The Gods Must Be Angry

[Eardstapa]

[for continuity's sake, i hope the poor old lemur was not lost. Akei, here goes, please follow up if i missed anything, thanks.]

The body slumped against the tree in the plaza was that of a withered old lemur, some time dead, judging from the stiffness of the corpse. If tempers had been flaring and accusations flying just moments earlier, a shared dread now united the group. They struggled to make sense of the image of the voluptuous fenki brutally carved into the skull. A crime of passion? But then this had not been the first skull so marked. A religious ritual slaughter? Perhaps. It had been pointed out that the tone and language of certain messages left with the bodies was self-righteous, perhaps even religiously fanatical. From chafe marks around his wrists, it looked like the victim had been bound, and perhaps that strangulation had been the killer's first resort. His or her last, it seemed, gaped in the neck of the poor lemur, a knife wound, strangely bloodless but oozing a green viscous liquid. Some of the crowd was disbanding in the midst of nervous muttering about leaving the business to the guards. Holding their own opinions about the competence of the guards, the others collected some globs of the green fluid using a kitchen knife. Finally, only two people remained by the corpse. Both had seen several bodies too many. Neither desired to take this one to the burial well. They parted ways to investigate their green samples. But before that, at the end of a trail of blood leading back to the tree, on the threshold of the Iron Temple they laid the poor old lemur, a note of warning against further violence addressed to the Laanxists and tied to the corpse with that symbol of anarchy/freedom/hope* [you choose], a bright yellow neckerchief.

[LigH]

* Esanor finds the table in the corner of Kada-El's with a strange etching: "LAANX COME HOME" - but the word LAANX crossed out and replaced by "Pentrian". He tries to find someone he remembers investigating...

[Mariana Xiechai]

Evirea drug a hand down her face, wiping away traces of moisture. Raising her face from the fountain, her fingers began to trace the impression of a small vial in her pocket, twitching occasionally at the sounds that kept ringing out from the city. Even the most minute thing was cacophonous to her. The clomp of Rivnak hooves against the cobbles, the ring of a hammer pounding away at a scrap of unformed metal. Bright things, too, swimming in her vision. Even in this back alleyway the ripples that reflected the crystal light on the surface of the water made her twitch. Hands gripping the cool rock of the smoothed edge, leaning over the structure, the klyros closed her eyes tightly and again forged onwards with her thoughts, desperately seeking the answer, the reason she'd denied herself the necessity of her medication. Details went flying past almost too quickly to be distinguishable, a never-ending tied of unfiltered information that made her nauseous. The bodies that were left kept coming up in her mind, their faces in stark contrast, their fingers curled in rigor mortis seeming to beckon to her, begging her to realize the detail that she'd missed. The thing that had been nagging so incessantly in the back of her mind, the thing that she was unable to decipher when she was in her right mind.

The anger at the child's death had been clouding her ability to properly think it through. She'd stewed over it for a few days, but her doubt began to get stronger, and as it did she realized that something about the entire equation didn't add up. No matter how many sleepless nights she spent, she just couldn't piece together precisely what that thing was. It all came down to this insane attempt, so she'd cloistered herself away in this dark back passageway to carefully garner what the missing part of the equation was. But plucking it out of the tidal wave of jumbled thoughts was proving to be harder than she would have thought.

Dead. All dead. Matter of days, really. Same True Death poison in each one. Suggests murder. Yet none of the bodies were known by any in the city. So many bodies, none of them known. Why? If fear was the goal, why not kill someone well known? Why these individuals that were practically nameless? Why leave them lying there, pointless, wordless, bloodless...

Bloodless.

Evirea's eyes snapped wide. “Bloodless,” she hissed out, and then let out a crow of laughter. “BLOODLESS! No blood! No blood means to transference, no carrying the poison to the vital organs! No circulation means no poisoning! No circulation means the True Death would be null and void. Blood was previously coagulated! Corpse was already dead at the time of stabbing!”

The grin that spread across the woman's face nearly seemed to split it. She stumbled away from the fountain, totally forgetting about everything else as she began to dart through the city streets, momentarily granted reprieve from her scattered mind as it honed in upon spreading word of this new discovery. Waving her hands above her head, she began babbling like someone depraved, exclaiming the same revelation over and over in a list of mostly nonsensical medical terminology that made quite a few people turn their heads and stare as though she'd completely lost her marbles. But the basic message was fairly understandable:

“No murders have been committed! A setup, all a setup! No one has been murdered!”

[Cairn]

[Someone paid attention in school! Fancy that  ]

*To be edited with current news in a few moments...*

[Catlemur]

A shadowy figure of a menki sips some mead at one of Kada El's tables.All those murders,by whom and why?Who cares.Perhaps I could join their little celebration.Some creativity might help spicing thing up hm?(he whispers to himself).He slowly take a quill and small piece of paper and places it into the table.Ηe starts writing while repeating pieces of what he already written.
Hail brother... our efforts have been quite succesful...we will soon be able to impose complete anarchy into the city... It shall live again.
The menki takes the note and leaves the tavern hastily after placing a few octas by the bartender.Quickly he mixes with the crowd and places the note as well as a recently stolen ring into a young Lemur's sack.Someone in the crowd shrieks "Thief!He went there!"The guards quickly surround the place arresting a dwarf,a Kran and the "lucky" Lemur.A cloacked figure grins as it watches the guards escorting the Lemur into the interogation chambers.

[Eardstapa]

[Someone paid attention in school! Fancy that  ]

*To be edited with current news in a few moments...*

* Eardstapa claps. "Nice work, Cairn, and Vire!"