WEEK 2

[umbralant]

WEEK 2

monday

tuesday

wednesday

thursday

The first week is over, and two of your number are gone. Everything related to the case has been cleaned up, with nary a knife left at the Main Square nor a trace of the mud shapes that once painted the clock tower walls, although some stray graffiti still dots some storefronts.

However you may feel about the entire debacle on Friday, there’s no doubt that something has changed about the atmosphere, although whether it’s something tangible or just a trick of the mind is hard to say. Maybe it’s nothing. Either way, there are more palpable changes to the city, with some of the fog retreating away from a few of the surrounding areas, uncovering new buildings and streets along the way. The night, however, remains unchanged as always save for the slow waxing of the moon, leaving it bright and full as early as Thursday night. Regardless of if you take it as an omen or not, at least that means the streets will be lit up fairly well for the week, provided some inconvenient cloud cover doesn’t slide right in.

[[Welcome to Week 2! Note that new areas have been added, and can be found under the Week 2 tab on our Locations page. Once again, feel free to make top levels at your discretion, and remember to note it in your header if you plan on investigating any locations. You can also privately contact The Lady or Rembrandt.]]

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Comments

pre-motive + more science investigation

[pr159]

[ In the morning, Rideaux is in the opera house with a sketchbook and a red colored pencil he grabbed from the art studio yesterday. Not for drawing, because he can't do that worth shit -- Instead, he's standing in front of his own portrait and writing down his name in the alphabet it appears in there.

Above it on the page, this is written, and he's looking from one to the other and frowning.


A little later in the morning, he'll be investigating the museum, specifically the parts reserved for employees... and more specifically, he'll start by digging through those purses in the lockers again. It looks like SOMEONE has already taken all the money like an asshole, but there might still be some things in here worth pillaging investigating. So!

Just to get this shit out of the way now, if he holds his breath and looks at some of those moldy containers, exactly how moldy are we talking? Does it look like this stuff has been in here for weeks or months, or longer? (Aside from the molds used for making some kinds of antibiotics, there was also a period of his life where he was mostly living off of old food people threw out, so. HE IS ACQUAINTED WITH MOLD.) ]

[deadlygoals]

[pr159]

[ god he hates you so much ]

[deadlygoals]

[ can't hear you under all this cash he has now ]

[umbralant]

[ This may be a murdercity, but sometimes you need to take initiative for the possibility of ever escaping and thereafter becoming a rich Polish noble. The early bird gets the worm and the cash, but there's still the moldy sandwiches left. And they're... not even that bad, honestly?

About a week old give or take, there might even be some salvageable bits if rations run low. ]

[pr159]

[ Well, that's definitely interesting. Are they, like, peanut butter or something, or is this unrefrigerated meat here, though?

Old sandwiches aside, is there anything else to be found if he digs through all of these for personal items? Any IDs? Makeup? Drugs? ]

[umbralant]

[ The sandwiches are an assortment of kanapki and zapiekanka—the ones with mayonnaise, ketchup, mushroom and cheese you probably don't want to touch but there are ones with cheese and pickles that are a whole lot less offensive. A couple of them are cold cuts too, which are also of questionable quality based on the meats (salami is probably much preferable to a fattier meat like bologna).

The rest of personal belongings yields the following: one tube of eyeliner, opened but not empty (is beauty worth risking an eye infection?), and a couple of tubes of chapstick. The belongings seem to mostly have belonged to men, so there's no veritable cache of makeup unfortunately, and there's not even a single tablet of aspirin. Reaching into the inside pocket of the bag to grab the eyeliner however does yield a different sort of texture than the rest of the bag—looks like something was sewn into the pocket. ]

[pr159]

[ ...Yikes at those sandwiches tbh.

He will take that eyeliner though, because look, you never know when you're going to really need a good cat eye. And let's see what that is we're feeling in the pocket. ]

[umbralant]

[ Get your cat eye on! For player reference, the eyeliner is black the most versatile color of them all. Onward to the pocket, it appears to be a patch of some sort. It's impossible to yank out of the pocket considering it's sewn in, without tools at least. ]

[pr159]

[ Good because I was definitely going to ask. Black is exactly what he would have hoped for.

Also, he just so happens to have three knives in his pocket, so! If he can set aside whatever nasty-ass sandwich was in this bag and turn it inside out at all, he'll try to get a look at the patch that way. And if that doesn't work he'll take a knife and rip that sucker out of there. ]

[umbralant]

[ Because it's pretty dark in here even if you're fumbling with candle light, ripping it out is the way to go. It's a cute heart patch with the initials KC. Hopefully whoever this belonged to didn't have a middle name that started with an F. ]

[pr159]

[ Ah yes, ripping out hearts, right up his alley.

Thanks for the eyeliner, KC. Since he is sadly lacking in knowledge of Earth's fried chicken chains, the thought about the middle initial does not occur to him, and he instead defaults to thinking "Kresnik Clan", even though he's sure there's no way that's what it stands for.

Anyway, he'll take it in case it somehow becomes relevant later.

Is there anything to be gained by looking further in any of these other lockers or is that it? ]

[umbralant]

[ Nope, that's it! Enjoy your eyeliner and the knowledge of where to find food that will surely give people food poisoning, Rideaux. ]

[pr159]

[ Oh, he will.

Is there an employee restroom or anything back here? ]

[umbralant]

[ There is, but there's nothing interesting to find except some fancy hand soap in the womens washroom. Considering the premium on toiletries here, it may also be a somewhat significant find. ]

opera house

[notbymyside]

[Well this is a curious sight. Ango will walk right on over to see what Rideaux is doing, and if he can get a glance at that page he will look a touch confused.]

Kanji?

[It looks kind of close to kanji? But the strokes aren't completely right. So maybe it's a different kind of writing all together?]

[pr159]

[ He blinks and looks up. He doesn't even recognize that as a word. ]

What?

[ So yes, that's a no. ]

[notbymyside]

The writing system. It resembles the one from my country, though it's not identical.

Each one of these symbols is a word, correct?

[pr159]

[ ??? ]

No, each one is a syllable. This is my name.

[ All ninety-something strokes of it... ]

The writing here looks so comically simplistic that it would be hard to believe it was a real language if I didn't miraculously understand it.

[notbymyside]

It certainly does. The writing I am used to, it's similar to yours. Each symbol is a word, though, rather than a syllable. May I?

[He indicates to Rideaux's pencil, asking permission to write something down to show him what he means.]

[pr159]

[ This is hard to imagine. Wouldn't they need hundreds of thousands of characters in that case?? ]

Go ahead.

[ Hands it over... ]

[notbymyside]

[More like a few thousand, but Ango will show that off in a moment.

He takes the pencil, and he pauses for a moment as he considers what to write. He could do his name, or Dazai's, but...

In the end, he writes two symbols: 織田 ]

This first one here means 'to weave'. As in, weaving fabric. The second symbol means 'rice paddy'. When you write them right next to each other like this, they combine to mean 'a woven rice paddy', as in rice paddies so close together they are like the weave of a cloth.

Or, more commonly, it's a family name. 'Oda'.

[pr159]

Hm. So all of your names are made up of combinations of words? That seems like it would be confusing.

[ He's used to middle names always having meanings, but his first name doesn't mean anything.

(Never tell him about French.) ]

Is it pronounced the same either way?

[notbymyside]

Sort of. The first part is conjugated when put into sentences, since it is a verb. But the base form is the same as in the name.

Actually, most names in my country are like that. My family name, Sakaguchi, means 'the opening of the hill', while my personal name, Ango, means 'I am relaxed.'

[Don't laugh at him, he knows his name does not fit him at all.]

It also depends on the exact symbols used to write it, as there are multiple ways to write both 'Sakaguchi' and 'Ango'. But the symbols for my name are as I described previously.

[pr159]

[ He raises an eyebrow at it, but doesn't actually laugh...

He thinks he kind of gets the basic concept, but he still can't really picture what it would be like to read pages of text in that language. It sounds like there's a lot of room for misreading. ]

So yours and mine and the one they use here -- all three really have completely different writing systems, then. Not just the way the characters are written, but what they represent.

[ though he STILL DOESN'T UNDERSTAND WHERE THIS POLISH SPELLING OF HIS FIRST NAME IS COMING FROM!! ]

Interesting... Though I have to say, I'm glad yours wasn't my first language.

[ He's pretty sure he would have had a much harder time pulling ahead of all the other agents if he'd had to teach himself to read that. ]