[For the Shadow Angel Detective Agency] "Leave your body Leave this body now"

[death_dawg]

A note has been posted on the bulletin board of the main room:

To the agents of the Shadow Angel Detective Agency:

Witnesses will be needed for a post-mortem examination. I will be the operating room of the basement lab, this afternoon.

JacquelIt's been a while since Jacquel has used his stills, and in some ways, it does not quite surprise him

Comments

[surfaceshine]

Dean managed to miss the actual deed, and he's not really sure how long the notice has been there by the time he notices it; he doesn't exactly scour the bulletin board as a rule. He raises an eyebrow at the succinct message then, taking a moment to remember if he even knows where the laboratory in question is, he goes to grab a beer and head down.

The tall hunter knocks at the door out of courtesy once he finds it, glancing around the room as he steps in without waiting; when he's close enough to see the body, he freezes, the dark hazelgreen eyes gone wide. It doesn't help that the table, all the instruments laid out, the bloodied cloths from cleaning her up in the trash, and the detached air of Jacquel - a man he was kind of weird around last time he met, with good reason - are all making his skin crawl. He recognizes her.

His tongue seems to have finally come loose, though his voice is tighter than he would've liked if he'd had any control over it at all. "What the hell happened?"

[death_dawg]

Jacquel looks up, nodding to Dean by way of greeting, then looks toward the slab. "Not entirely sure if it was self-defense or the result of a fight gone bad, but it would seem Miss Aramat tangled with the wrong young man," he says. Then noting Dean's discomfort, he adds, "If you're not comfortable, you don't have to stay. Not everyone can take this sort of thing, so there's no shame in passing. I put the notice up to bring this to the attention of the Agency, in case people started to ask after her whereabouts."

[surfaceshine]

Jacquel calling attention to Dean's discomfort does nothing to dispel it, but gives the hunter every reason to shove it down mercilessly and put his game face on, which he does. It's an action so familiar that it fits into the space of time it takes him to lift his chin a bit higher and meet Jacuel's eyes, and a muscle in his jaw jumps in the moment before he speaks.

"I'm good. Do we know the young man?" Dean is going to hate himself forever when he hears it was Gunji. He almost had a showdown with that same kid, but they both backed off. Dean shouldn't have. He knew the kid was dangerous, and he backed off anyway. "Does she... is there someone that should ask after her whereabouts?"

Then he remembers, and he feels his pulse quicken involuntarily. "Wait - I thought death wasn't permanent around here?"

[death_dawg]

"No one I know by name: he was a tall, slender young man, blonde, heavily tattooed, dressed in a red cloak with a hood," he says, pulling on a pair of vinyl gloves. "It seems people form loosely-constructed families of the friends they've made here, so as peculiar and ...off-putting as she might be, there's bound to be someone wondering where she's gotten to, or why she isn't in her room tonight.

"But it would seem that every case is different: she's dead now, but the question is, will she stay dead or will she return to life?" he adds, looking to the body.

[whutobjection]

After that whole business of last night being woken up by an irate older woman, Phoenix feels that's it's necessary for him to come. Still... Wasn't this Muraki's place?, he thought.

Phoenix has seen his fair share of crime scenes and victims in his times as a defense attorney, but he hasn't been privy to a post-mortem examination before. Seeing the body like this... honestly kinda freaks him out. He turns to Jacquel.

"Pardon, we never met before... I'm Phoenix Wright, a member of the agency..." He nods his head toward's Aramat's body.

"Who was the victim?"

[death_dawg]

By now, he's likely cut into Aramat's body, assessing the damage to the internal organs, thus her skin is peeled back in a Y-cut across her torso and her rib cage has been separated. Switching off the dictaphone and raising his goggles, the tall, dark gent in the surgical garb turns to Phoenix. "I wish we could have met under different circumstances, but it's good to have you here, Mr. Wright," he says, in a calm, deep voice. "I'm Mister Jacquel: I'm the medical examiner, crime-scene investigator and general scientific dogsbody of the agency." There might be a bit a wry smirk on the word "dogsbody".

[whutobjection]

Of course Phoenix being Phoenix, that joke goes right over his head. He may cringe a bit at the sight of her body being cut up, but says nothing about it, this is a necessary thing.

"Same here... now, about the woman?"

[death_dawg]

"I know her as Aramat Drawdes, but I have a good feeling the name was as pseudonym," he says, looking back to the body. "Female, mid-thirties, got into a nasty knife-and-metal claws fight with a strange young man I met in a hallway. He claims self-defense, but given the cuts the young man got, I'd say it was a fight gone horribly wrong and she got the worst of it."

[gettin2old4this]

Have the caller of the Agents coming down the stairs, mind running feverishly over last night, and what she sensed in sleep. It's still fuzzy, but some details are coming back. (And they make her tense... she knew the mansion was strange, but she never thought portals existed in this place... some to undesirable worlds.)

Add to this the sudden disappearance and possible death of Titus, and you have the closest thing to a nervy Genkai. Not that anyone would notice this outside of herself. She calmly glances at Jacquel, then the body.

"I figured you would be the one to take her."

[death_dawg]

"I sensed her death," he says, glancing up, likely in the middle of examining Aramat's intestines, running the lengths of the long, tube-like organ through his gloved hands. If Genkai blinks, there might be a brief image of a figure with the head of a jackal, clad only in a white linen kilt, standing over the slab. "She slipped away too quickly for her soul to stand before me, but I wouldn't have wanted to weigh her heart, damnedly heavy feather or not."

[gettin2old4this]

Genkai does blink and sees the god before her. If she were younger, she'd be starstruck.

"Her soul was taken away... without her will. That woman died in utter fear... whatever she was, no one deserves to have their soul be scared out of their wits. Doesn't make for a good afterlife."

[death_dawg]

"It didn't where I come from, either, though, it might be a mercy compared to the Christian hell," he says, moving on to the large intestine. "Where I come from, if your soul outweighed Maat's feather, you were thrown to the beast called Ammit: once she'd eaten you, that was it, nothing left to you."

He switches on the dictaphone, and turning to it, speaks. "No trauma to the small intestine, and no trauma to the large intestine, either."

[in_summer_leaf]

By the time Hisoka arrives, the autopsy is well under way. He would have liked to look down into Aramat's face and lay a hand on her cheek or forehead, and wish her well in the world to come -- wherever that might be. He doesn't fear the gore or the disassembly of the body -- in his second life, war had acquainted him with all of that, dead enemies, dead friends, and he can no longer react the way a normal person would, for good or ill. (If being a shinigami hadn't been enough.) But it would be an inconvenience to Jacquel, who is doing the work he is supposed to do. And Aramat is past caring

[death_dawg]

He'll likely arrive as Jacquel is weighing Aramat's viscerae on a laboratory scale, starting with her lungs, making a note via the dictaphone.

When Hisoka enters, he switches off the dictaphone, then replaces the lungs back in the dead woman's chest. "You must be the junior member of the Agency: you saw my notice on the messageboard?" he says.

[in_summer_leaf]

"I would be the youngest of the Shadow Angels," agrees Hisoka. "I forgot to mention that when we spoke through the aether. I saw your message, yes. Do you see any evidence of anything strange about Lady Aramat's death, other that she was killed by a man with steel claws?"

[death_dawg]

He looks to the body. "I would have to look deeper, but that can be arranged," he says, taking her heart from the metal basin in which it lies, then places it on the scale, carefully.

There might be a blink of an image: in his place a figure of a being with the head of a jackal, clad in a white kilt and sandals. And then, in his place is the dark figure in surgical garb is standing in it's place.

[precognitioning]

We don't know what Sam knows yet, but he's probably heard at least a little from Dean and while he's not precisely...displeased? He's a little displeased. Nonetheless, he thought he should come and take a look at this case they're investigating with his own eyes. Particularly given Dean's...reaction.

So Sam will be venturing down to the basement, expression somewhat intense and definitely interested. At least this is a scene he's relatively familiar with.

[death_dawg]

By the time Sam arrives, Jacquel is putting the viscerae back into the subject's torso, starting with the intestines and working upward. But as Sam approaches, he looks up. "Almost finished here," he says. "But I've got the chemical substance screen and a few other matters," he adds, glancing to the row of specimen jars lined up on a nearby table.

[precognitioning]

Sam goes over to look at them, after, surveying Jacquel briefly. So this is what's left of Aramat, he thinks, and this is what they'll all get reduced to, in the end. Morbid thought. "Anything interesting?" He asks, mildly enough.

[death_dawg]

"Aside from the metal claw marks on the torso and the scars from the self-inflicted injuries on the arms and the cuts where she must have punched a mirror, one lung has collapsed from the trauma to her torso, and she was missing her ovaries and uterus: someone did an oophiectomy on her some time ago," he says. "Cause of death: blood loss, complicated by lack of oxygen due to the collapsed lung."