Within moments, the 30-odd people seated around the area broke into two factions, largely independent of their original loyalties. Slightly over half watched the scene with curiosity for a moment, had some kind of ephemeral reaction - some said a few words to their friends, others laughed, a couple more responded with their own mock-horror - then seemed to lose interest and return to their meals. One person (was that the man Kam had spoken to in the hall earlier...?) even hurriedly finished the last couple strips of pork left on his plate and left immediately, which if you took the scene literally was a little funny.
On the other hand, the remainder all did their best to react realistically. Several gasped in horror, and most set down their knives and forks and rose from their seats at once to convene on the victim. One person grew rather pale and gagged impressively convincingly, which was a pity because I was pretty sure I was the only one actually looking.
A man (who I at first thought was Isaac due to their similar fashion sense, but actually had a black beard instead of a mustache) rushed over and, despite the loud declaration from moments ago, checked the pulse of and made an arbitrary attempt to resuscitate the victim, giving her mouth-to-mouth and applying pressure to her chest. Of course, it was sadly in vain, and he was soon shaking his head at the now-considerable crowd surrounding him. He began inspecting the body, and a nearby woman burst into tears.
I glanced at Kam, who was looking at me with the kind of expectant enthusiasm of someone who is showing you their favorite drama for the first time, hungry for every drop of vicarious dopamine.
I wasn't quite on the level she seemed to hope I was, though. "With the way you were hyping this up, I was kind of expecting something a little more... out there."
She was visibly disappointed, but remained committed to the bit. "What do you mean, 'out there'? There's been a murder, Su! Poor Zola was killed! Don't you want to do something?"
I scrunched up my face in distaste. "Don't do that. I hate this kind of humor."
"What kind of humor." Her face grew more sardonic as she lowered her voice slightly.
"You know, where you insist something obviously fake is serious. Faux-gaslighting."
"Faux-gasli--" She cut herself off, spitting air. "I can't believe how melodramatic you are about absolutely everything under the Great Lamp. It's ridiculous." She put a hand on her hip. "Anyway, I'm not trying to make you bloody well laugh anyway. I'm trying to get you to immerse into the scene."
I scratched the side of my head, looking back towards the unfolding scene. The doctor had the victim's mouth open now, poking around with a tongue depressor. "It's a bit hard after what we did the other week. This kind of just feels like, I don't know, party roleplay." I hesitated. "It is just roleplay, right? There isn't any Tertiary shit this time, is there?"
"I mean, that rather depends of what you mean by 'Tertiary shit', I suppose," she replied. "There are Tertiaries present, but no, none of them have been brought into being for this event. That sort of thing isn't done in the Domain proper. It's all just a bit of fun."
I sighed. "Well, that's good, I guess."
"I would have thought you'd have cultivated a knack for it by now."
"A knack?"
"You know, a sense on what the people you're talking to are," she clarified. "Did Ptolema not tell you about that?"
"She did, but she said it took a long time to develop," I replied, which was incorrect. You'll recall what Ptolema had actually said was that it happened 'after you've been here long enough', but at some point I'd started assuming everything in Dilmun happened on a geological timescale, and was applying that assumption even in retrospect.
Kamrusepa shook her head. "Goodness, it halfway feels like she was setting you up to fail," she remarked. "It shouldn't be difficult to learn at all, considering how accomplished you already are as an arcanist. Just follow my instructions."
"O...Okay," I said. I glanced at my barely-touched breakfast, which I was beginning to feel was never going to be finished.
"I want you to look at me, and conceptualize my body in the same way that you would if you were trying to target an incantation. Wait until you have that little click feeling they teach you about in the basic course. Go on, do it."
I had no choice but to obey. Regarding Kam closely, I took her in as a discrete object as best I could, tracing the lines of her body and separating them - with assumption where sight failed - from the chair she was sitting on, the air swirling around her, and so forth.
Unlike the memorization, mathematical, and enunciation aspects of learning to use the Power, the targeting aspect - or conceptualization, as they said in school - was not completely understood, and in many ways was rather unfair. Some of it came down to spatial intelligence and physical imagination (though there were people who managed even with a blind mind's eye), but a lot of it came down to fiddly particularities of personal psychology and how well one's mind jelled with the Index it ended up with. I'd met arcanists who'd aced every test before their Induction, only to get stuck doing low-level work because they couldn't get the Power to distinguish between objects unless they were both perfect cubes on the opposite sides of a room.
Other than very specific things I've talked about before like flying, it was the part of it that felt closest to actually magical. You looked at it, felt it out, and then you could just tell you'd locked on it, feel the impression of it lock into your mind like a solved puzzle, an object pulled loose from a dark void. I'd only ever been a little bit above average at it, so it took me a moment to feel confident, to feel that slotting into place she was talking about.
"Okay," I repeated. "I don't... think I feel anything out of the ordinary?"
"Try it again on a few other people," she urged. "At least a half-dozen."
I didn't care for this sort of prompting-heavy ambiguous approach when it came to being taught something any more than I cared for it when trying to get answers on more personal things - but still, I followed my instructions. Since a lot of the crowd was now clumped together in a group some distance away, it was tough to find good targets I felt confident in not futzing. The pair of women I'd seen talking earlier were still around, so I tried them, plus a man who had stood nearby but never actually gone all the way to the far side of the table. And now I had a better look at Isaac's group, so I tried a couple of them before focusing on the man himself...
"Mm," I said.
"You feel it?"
"I'm not... sure," I said. I inclined my head towards Isaac. "I might be imagining it, but there's a sense of, I don't know, a difference in - effort, towards some people, maybe. Well, no, effort isn't quite the right word..."
I remembered that Ptolema had described the distinction in terms of weight. Primaries were heavy, Secondaries were lighter, and Tertiaries were almost weightless. But that wasn't quite what I was experiencing here.
This is a factoid that I'm sure you've heard a gazillion times before - actually, I believe the Lady brought it up briefly - but the human brain is constantly filtering out information that it deems unnecessary. Reality is simply too complicated for the conscious mind to take in; if we really saw every little detail of the world, even just the surface-level information taken in by our eyes, we'd go absolutely gaga, overstimulated from zero to generalized TC seizure in seconds. That goes for all of our senses-- Try running a finger over some skin, feeling for every pore and indent, and watch the rest of reality drop completely off the map.
But your brain does feel it, even if you don't, every bit of data it has to set aside. Like I said ages ago, it's why contrasting colors look terrible, why chaos itself is unpleasant.
Chaos. That was the word for it. People here varied in how chaotic it felt to target them, the complexity of texture. Kam was complicated. Isaac was... not simple, but somehow more homogenized. One of the two women even more so.
Kamrusepa was nodding. "Excellent. You picked that up even faster than I hoped."
"I mean, I don't know if I could break them down cleanly into three groups," I said, biting my lip softly. "It feels more like a spectrum." I pointed towards Seth, who was one of the ones involved in the mystery plot. "Like, he feels even more effortful than you do."
"Mm, the lines aren't quite as simple as they first appear," Kam agreed. "Technically speaking, our 'bodies' in this world are made up of information. The prop we control is only part of that; our memories and our Indexes are part of those too, both of which can vary wildly even between individuals of the same order." She raised her fingers to her lips thoughtfully. "Beyond that, not even prop was created equal. It has a past of its own, after all, which remains impressed into it."
"You mean, when it was part of the sanctuary," I commented, still trying to get the hang of this.
"Mm, among other things."
I blinked, turning to her. "Other things? I thought the rest was all taken from the Ironworker facility."
"It most likely was," Kam said. "But they weren't just using our three conventional dimensions alone. You can't possibly believe their observation facility was just those uniform blocks of metal we saw encompassing that cavern."
"Well, no," I admitted. I squinted. "What else is there, then?"
"Remnants. Of the arks, places observed by the facility so deeply they were impressed into its structure, of the foundational scripting of the Remaining World." She narrowed her eyes in turn. "And other things lost in the black hole in which it was constructed, long predating even the human race."
I looked back towards the people around us. "I can't believe you accused me of being melodramatic."
"There's a difference between melodrama and appropriate gravitas. I never allow myself to forget how many layered miracles were required to bring us to this moment, " she argued. "But I digress. Your judgement doesn't need to be perfect, not yet. If you just get into the habit of comparing people and sorting them on the basis of that feeling, you should be able to get a sense of a leaning that's right nine times out of ten."
"Alright, that makes sense," I said with a nod. "I guess I should probably thank you. This, uh, might be the first time since my first day that anyone other than the Lady has given me immediately useful information."
"Don't be thankful, be engaged," she urged. "This is a good chance to make some connections and show off your talent. Having seen how you performed back on the train, you'll be shocked by how dreadful many of this lot are at deduction despite it being their hobby for millennia."
I made an awkward expression. "It's not the deduction part I'm worried about. I can't do, like, improv. It's too embarrassing."
"That's absurd. You were doing something like this just the other day."
"That was different. The vibe was different."
Kam looked scary for a moment. "Su, we're both grown women. I'm not going to indulge this bloody wallflower act of yours like we're in some boarding school romance. Now, you can get over there and have fun while also serving our mutual goals consensually, or I can make you while also illustrating how you have not even yet come to grasp the true meaning of the word 'embarrassing'. I trust I make myself quite clear?"
I wrinkled my nose. "You don't have to make threats. I was going to take a closer look anyway, it's just a little..." I didn't want to say 'lame', but struggled to find a better word.
"Would it help to know that it's not staged?" She inclined her head towards the scene. "Obviously everyone knew it was coming - the culprit is picked by lot in advance, so there's not total chaos at every meal - but the actual murders are all impromptu and entirely authentic. No fiddling behind the curtain like Nahmi and I were doing before, pure manipulation of circumstance."
That gave me a little pause. Macabre Dilmunite fixations aside, the idea of people actually executing a murder in real life, without access to any of the ridiculous assets or contrivances of circumstance that were just treated as a given in the murder mystery genre, was...
..well, actually, was it even interesting? If you removed the complexity, the actual death, and the drama of spectacular violence, wasn't murder essentially just a prank? Putting a whoopee cushion on someone's chair, that kind of thing?
"Come on, Su," Kam said, pinching my sleeve. "You're going to miss it."
And so: We headed down to the far end of the table, where the doctor (who was probably not an actual doctor, did the concept of 'doctor' even exist here?) was concluding his examination. "...on the tension in the surrounding muscles, I can only conclude the cause was strychnine poisoning, likely around 10 minutes prior to the time of death."
"I knew it! So she was poisoned!" The previously-screaming woman, who seemed to be angling for a sort of damsel-heroine role, exclaimed. "That's why she was pointing at the lamb before she died, someone must have put it there!"
"Don't be stupid," Koni, who was also present, replied. "Strychnine tastes bitter. Roast lamb is sweet. She'd have noticed."
"Maybe they disguised it somehow," an older woman (or, well, I suppose an equally-old woman who had decided to look that way for whatever reason) speculated. "Is the meat honeyed? Is the meat heavily salted or sugared?"
"I don't think it is," some guy at the periphery said. "I didn't have any of it, but I got quite close when I was refilling my drink. I think it was just dusted with mint."
"We can't rely on hearsay," the doctor, who I got the impression was hogging the spotlight a little bit too much for his role, stated. "I'll examine the meat myself." He pulled the dish forward, poking at it with a fork as if he were performing another autopsy.
"What's the situation?" Kamrusepa asked as we strolled over, instantly in take-charge mode.
"Zola's been killed," Koni said, his tone clearly not entirely self-serious. "Choked to death."
"Which one is her plate?" Kam asked, looking down at the breakfast spread.
Koni indicated it. Other than the lamb, there were two other items present: Some fruit-and-flower-petal salad, which appeared largely untouched, and a half-eaten mini-loaf doused in gravy. There were also crumbs which suggested the past presence of a potato-based item, but nothing remained to discern its nature. She appeared to have only been drinking water.
Kam regarded this for a moment, then sighed and surveilled her subjects closely. "Who was sitting closest to her when this happened? On either side and across?"
"I... I was on her left," the damsel said. "We were talking when it happened. That's why I was the first to realize what was happening."
"I was on the right," the periphery guy said. (Spoilers, but he doesn't end up mattering at all. That's why I'm not bothering to go into any of his characteristics. (There's something to be said about the contrast between him and the lady opposite. Neither of them seemed to have much clout in the Domain generally, and neither were particularly good actors or, so best as I could tell, mystery-solvers. But even though they'd both been right next to the victim, she was thrusting herself into the spotlight aggressively, while he seemed worried about saying more than a few words. I'm not sure where I'm doing with this, other than to say that success in life is 80% about being noisy.))
Seth stuck his hand up lazily. "Uh, that was me. I didn't see much, though-- I was too busy talking to Mei." He jerked his thumb at the cheerful girl, who nodded enthusiastically, though this time with a grave expression that made the whole gesture kind of weird.
"You two, then," Kam spoke to the other two. "Tell me what you observed her eating and drinking, over the course of the meal. Did she have anything other than what's on her plate? Did she touch anything, for that matter?"
"I... I'm not sure," she demured. "I-- I'm only sure of what she was eating. It was the lamb with some of the gravy, the bread, a hash brown... and the salad." She gulped. What's a 'hash brown'? "And she only drank the water. I offered her some orange juice at the start, but she refused."
Kam nodded analytically. "I see. It doesn't look like there are any other possibilities for her meat and savory food, but which pitcher of water did she take from? And which salad bowl?"
"It was this pitcher," she said, pointing to one on her right. "A-And this bowl, I think."
"You think?"
The woman furrowed her brow. "I'm sorry... It's all a blur."
Kam clicked her tongue, then looked to the man. "And you?"
"She definitely got her salad from that bowl," he said, and I could tell how pleased he was with being able to deliver even this paltry scrap of information. "I saw it myself."
"I'll inspect all the relevant items," the doctor, who now seemed satisfied with the lamb, said. What was he even doing? Just sniffing them?
"The hash brown tray is already empty," the older woman remarked.
"There may still be trace remnants of the substance," the doctor retorted.
"This is stupid," Koni said. "You guys are being total dumbasses about this. The fact that it's empty obviously means we don't need to inspect the hash brown tray, because tons of people ate one from that plate. I ate one. And we're fine."
"It could have been a random poisoning!" Mei suggested. "A serial killer, maybe, or a terrorist attack?"
"Nah, it's target-only murders this week," Seth whispered to her.
"Oh." She held a hand to her lips.
"Konala is quite right," Kamrusepa said. "We can reasonably assume that every dish which has been widely consumed could not have contained any poison. Ergo, the only ones which should invite scrutiny are those which have not." She pointed her finger. "In addition to the hash brown tray, multiple people have drawn from the salad bowl, the bread tray, the gravy pot, and the jug of water she was making use of. Therefore, we can conclude the lamb is indeed the likely source of the poisoning."
"I'll redouble my efforts," the doctor declared, once again hunching over it. (What this meant was ambiguous.)
"Did anyone observe anyone other than her touching the lamb?" Kam declared. "Reaching over it, perhaps?"
The group, or at least those sufficiently committed to the bit, shared anxious and suspicious glances.
"If I may," the tall man from earlier - who appeared to have been sitting to the left of Mei, who was in turn sitting to the left of Seth - "I am loath to make accusations at this point, when we still have a poor understanding of the facts. But it must be said that, early in the meal, I did observe her reaching over the lamb to obtain a fish platter. Her hand came very close to the meat."
The woman gasped. "Y-Y-You're saying you think I killed her! I would never!"
"You did kinda declare she was dead right away, just 'cause she fell over," Koni observed. "Kinda sus."
"No... no, it's not like that! I could just see it in her eyes!" She held her hands up. "You have the wrong idea, I swear!" She retreated into herself, pain in her eyes. "And in case, I wasn't even the only one who reached for the fish! He did, too!" She pointed at the forgettable man.
"Oh." He blinked, seeming unable to respond to this level of attention. "No, I was actually getting the scrambled eggs." He paused for a moment, seeming to forget why he was saying this. "...and I didn't do anything to the meat."
"Let's avoid jumping straight towards any accusations," Kamrusepa urged. "The most obvious suspect isn't whoever happened to have a moment where they might have merely touched the lamb, anyway-- It would be far more challenging to plant the poison with any subtlety in such a circumstance. No, obviously we should start with whoever delivered and prepared the lamb. Who was on roast duty today?"
This time, it was the tall man's turn to frown. "I confess that I was today, but I can prove my innocence."
She squinted. "Is that so, Izdur?"
He nodded. "I personally make a policy of taking a final taste of anything I have cooked in the kitchen right before it's sent off, and as it happened, I was with Mei and Seth at the time. They can both vouch that I would have had no chance to poison the meat." He looked towards them expectantly.
Kam did the same. "Is this true, Seth?"
"Uh, yeah." Mei nodded.
"Man, that's not even close to airtight," Koni commented. "He could totally have put the poison, like, deeper in, past where he knew his slice would be."
Izdur scoffed, adjusting his glasses. "That's not how that works. It's not like I had a syringe, and if I'd just put a drop or two on top there's no assurance she would have even been killed. Strychnine isn't like cyanide, you know that, you can't use a completely trivial dose."
Kamrusepa hummed. "I won't say this evidence utterly exonerates you... but it does create considerable doubt, so let's move on for now. Next, who delivered the lamb?"
"Um, that would be me..." A previously quiet, shorter girl with dark hair chimed in from the rear of the group. "I carried it from the kitchen to the table. But it was one of the first dishes we brought out, and all of you left the kitchen right afterward, so it wasn't like it wasn't unattended after that. It could have been anyone!"
"Is this true?" Kam asked, glancing around.
"You know it's true, Kam!" Mei declared. "We were talking to you and Susan then, remember?"
"Mmm, yes, yes." She looked towards me. "Speaking of which. Any thoughts?"
I stiffened. For a moment, I'd started to hope she'd forgotten about me.
It feels a bit weird to rate murder methods, but to be honest, I didn't find poisonings particularly interesting. Since they were necessarily done remotely and always killed the victim in the same way (they're tricked into touching/eating the object in question) the amount of ways they could be employed was pretty limited. Everyone knew the 'subversive' tropes: Poison on the glass, poison on the lipstick, poison in the eye drops. Poison that actually didn't even exist and was just the trigger for the victim's previously unknown allergy. Poison in the candles. Poison on the toilet paper.
There was exactly one clever trick I'd ever seen done with it, which was the one where it turned out that everyone had been given the poison, but excepting for the victim who had also been administered an antidote, inverting the mystery in an interesting way and making it about a negative occurrence as opposed to a positive one. (A good rule of thumb for mystery tricks is the more fundamental an assumption is turned against you, the more interesting the result, though it also made it more challenging to write it in a way that wasn't stupid.)
But just because of the scope of the meal, I doubted that was the case here, not to mention the fact that it was probably impossible to pull off in reality with how antidotes actually worked. And beyond that solitary exception, poisoning deduction always just devolved into a game of comparing accounts to narrow down who could have been where and touched what until only one possibility remained. Satisfying if you enjoyed Sudoku puzzles, not so much if you wanted to do out-of-the-box thinking.
Well, at least there's one thing they've missed, or at least pretended to miss, I thought. Maybe if I put that on the table, they'll let me off the hook.
"...I think you've written off the idea of it being something other than the lamb too soon," I said. I was doing my best not to use my regular intonation as to try and throw off Seth, though I suspected if we had prolonged contact that could end up being a lost cause. "Was what she was eating her usual? Did she generally have the same things for breakfast?"
The damsel-and-possible-culprit nodded. "Yes, I think so. I mean - the same thing isn't served every single day, but most of the same items."
"Okay," I said. "In that case, the hash brown could have been used to poison her too. If the culprit knew she was going to serve herself one, all they would have to do would be to make sure they were the second-to-last to do so. Then there'd be no risk of poisoning anyone else other than her."
"Man, I dunno, that's kinda..." Koni made a weird anti-smile, showing his teeth. "Like, how would you control that? It's kinda chaos when we're all just chowing down. Might not be able to grab the plate at the right time."
"You'd just have to be really greedy," I said. "If you took the plate, and served yourself every hash brown except just one, then set it back near her..."
Kam was nodding. "Mmm, mmm. Interesting theory, Susan." She looked to the others. "Did anyone happen to serve themselves a large measure of hash browns, shortly before the last one was taken by poor Zola?"
"Um," Mei said, and pointed. "I didn't think anything of it when it happened, because he was a few seats down and it was right at the start... but he did."
I followed her finger. It was directed squarely at none other than the doctor, who was still inspecting the lamb. He looked up, and blinked.
"Wh." He said. "What?"
Oh, come on, I thought. It can't be that simple. Him being the doctor too - it's all so on the nose.
"An accusation has been leveled against you, Raul," Kamrusepa declared theatrically. "Have you naught to say for yourself?"
"I... no. That's..." He looked almost pitiful. "I just-- You know how much I like hash browns."
"I recall your love for them as being quite average, actually," she retorted. Some snickered in the background.
The damsel, distressed by the shifting of attention away from her, widened her eyes. "I-- I saw him too! And he took a long time to do it, and set the plate right down in front of her!" She looked towards me. "Yes, you must have it, that must be it!"
I laughed nervously. I was starting to wonder if they set this all up just to have a better chance at recruiting me.
But then a voice rang out behind me. It was clear and deep, and drew closer surprisingly quickly, to the point it made the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. "A fine theory," it spoke. "But aren't you missing an even more fundamental possibility?"
Mei gasped, and several other people had perked up too. "Oh!" She declared. "It's the Great Detective!"
Incredulous at the terminology being invoked, I quickly looked behind me, and came face-to-face with a giant black bird.