3. You may be a warning of things to come.

[bestsir]

Who: Harry Goodsir and divers hands
What: La'an's postmortem and after
Where: The Milton church
When: After the Darkwalker claims its victim
Warnings: There's an autopsy. Goodsir has some PTSD. Fun for the whole family.

The unheated church basement will do for a mortuary. Someone finds a long table and Goodsir has La'an's poor cold corpse laid out on it, covered with a sheet.

He hasn't performed an autopsy—

(Twenty. I have performed on—)

—here, not yet. The deaths that have occurred so far have presented no mystery, but La'an's is something new and terrifying, and Goodsir feels he must get to the bottom of it.

[ There are a couple of prompts for Goodsir specifically, but feel free to start your own threads. ]

Comments

[spoilers]

Cue one more volunteer who may or may not introduce herself as a professor while conveniently omitting the fact her doctorate is, in fact, in archaeology. Though not wholly insensitive, she does appear largely unaffected. She hadn't really known La'an, and it's hardly the first time she's seen death. Her interest clearly isn't entirely academic, nor does it seem to be out of concern but rather, well, she's curious.

Mainly, she's only here to observe. She's not really expecting they'll find much. But after the little hiccup early on, she almost offers to take over. After all, if they're going to chop up the poor girl's body, they should at least show some competence. Then they're off again, and he manages reasonably enough she decides she'll hold her peace until he's finished.

"Theories then?"

[bestsir]

Goodsir sighs. "Whatever it was—that ... thing, the noise—I can only conclude that it affected her so deeply that she died of fright. Unless it ..."

He pauses. He's about to say unless it stopped her heart, but despite everything, the sentence still sounds absolutely bizarre in his mind.

[spoilers]

Oh, no, she doesn't intend to let him off that easily.

"Unless it...?" she prompts, though she has a fair idea what he'd been about to say. She's had the thought herself.

She'd made note of the odd there-but-not-there green glow trace hovering about near the body, but it doesn't seem to have played any active role in her death. To all appearances, it really does look as though La'an was frightened to death. But fear doesn't kill, at least not directly. What else does that leave?

[bestsir]

"Unless the thing itself was capable of—of interfering with her body, but without leaving a trace," he says, a little reluctantly. But the conclusion is difficult to escape.

[spoilers]

Ah, well. Close enough.

Idly, she wonders why this place has drawn in so many from even its apparent past. But there are more important matters at hand.

"I thought you might find something like that. No marks on the body, no obvious injury. Too quick for most poisons unless it had been introduced to her system earlier, which would beg a whole new set of questions."

[bestsir]

"Just so," Goodsir says, and he looks at the woman with a fresh respect in his eyes. "I suppose a—a toxin of some kind cannot be ruled out completely, but nothing suggests it to my eye as it is. Certainly nothing she ingested, at the least."

[spoilers]

She nods, humming in either acknowledgement or agreement, likely both. "You said she hadn't been eating."

Some toxins could be absorbed through the skin to lethal effect. She would know. But her instincts tell her that isn't the case here, perhaps because it seems La'an had known something was coming, had been preparing to meet it.

"I think perhaps a more important question is why her." Because something tells her, whoever or whatever is responsible, La'an was chosen, and that meant any of them might be next.

[bestsir]

"The answer to that question is, I'm afraid, one that won't be answered here," Goodsir says with a resigned sigh. "Nothing I have found offers so much as a hint."

apologies and thank you for putting up with my tagging speed lately! maybe a good place to fade?

[spoilers]

No, of course not. River hadn't imagined it would be. But it was something she couldn't help asking, something she would wonder about, something that would keep her curious. Had it been random, could it have been any one of them, or had something caused her to be singled out, left her more vulnerable than the rest?

"I expect it wouldn't," she said finally, then more softly, "Time will tell."

np! works for me - thank you!

[bestsir]

"And hopefully less harshly," Goodsir agrees sadly.