Fortunately for my dignity, I didn't scream, but I did let out a sort of startled gasp, leaning backwards so hard that I almost fell into a chair. I actually felt briefly lightheaded, my mind going to some dream or memory as if I was about to pass out, but my hand hitting the wood slammed me out of it.
Regaining my bearings somewhat, a second look revealed them not to be a bird but merely to have bird characteristics. Most of his body was that of a man (he was wearing a sort of business casual getup, a tunic with a little scarf and black trousers) but his head - larger than it should have been proportionally - was that of a crow or raven, and instead of arms he had massive black wings partially wrapped around himself like a cloak. His creepy bird eyes stared at me piercingly.
(I'm saying 'he' here, but if it weren't for the voice, he could have easily been a woman. It's a little hard to guess someone's sex when they don't have shoulders, arms or a face.)
"I," I said.
A chuckle came from somewhere behind his beak, followed by a voice. It didn't seem to move in accord with any tongue or lips, but didn't sound mechanical, either, simply emanating clearly from nowhere. "Don't take offense, my girl. It's a common mistake, to allow the framing of the question to dictate your answer. Within that scope - the concept of 'the victim's food was poisoned during the dinner or its preparations - your observation was quite astute." He lowered a wing in what might have been intended to be a bow. "You have my compliments."
Despite breaking what felt like an unbroken rule in butting in like this without even being present at the dinner, the people around me seemed more star-struck than offended, with the damsel having abandoned her affect from a moment ago to stare at our new arrival in speechless shock, and Koni looking hyped up and seemingly waiting for a window to cut into the conversation. Even Seth looked somewhat pleasantly surprised, smiling and chuckling a little to himself.
The exception to this was Kamrusepa, who glared at the new arrival, her tone as dry as a bone. "Detective," she spoke sardonically. "I beg your pardon, but Susan here is a newcomer to the Domain. We were just giving her a moment to chime in, if you don't mind."
Mei looked torn between her fangirlish attitude towards Kam and the new contender. "Oh, I'm sure he didn't mean to be rude..."
Koni, seeing a window, went for it. "Dude, I can't believe you're finally--"
But the 'great detective' steamrolled right through him. "A newcomer? Well, that's a rarity indeed!" He took a step forward, once more closing the distance between us. "I must beg your pardon then, miss," he said, his tone grown more cordial. "If you are only recently arrived, you could not possibly have known the scope of the criminal minds of the ill-mannered get of this unseemly place, Miss Susan...?"
I was a little taken off-guard. This was the first time anyone had asked me my last name in Dilmun. "S-- Sharoni," I improvised.
"Miss Sharoni," he said smoothly. "Would you mind if I offered some thoughts of my own? I believe I have a hunch as to what may lie at the heart of this matter."
I hesitated. While his persona was clearly meant to be charming, now that I'd got over my initial shock at his appearance, I was actually feeling strangely bold in my annoyance of this development. I felt a little condescended to, his praise of my reasoning coming across as a little pat on a child's head. Who did he think he was? He had no idea what I was thinking.
"...uh, sure," I said stiffly. "But I wasn't like I was only theorizing within that 'scope'. I had other theories that questioned more premises than that, I was just starting with the low-hanging fruit."
It was difficult to tell because, again, bird head, but it looked like he was trying to raise his eyebrow. "Oh? Please then, go ahead. I'd be curious as to how far you'd go."
I frowned. I felt like I was being baited into something here. "Well, for one thing, we've only verified the food wasn't poisoned during the cooking process. It could have happened earlier, when it was still raw ingredients."
He nodded. "True enough - though I would suspect they are washed before being prepared."
"They are," the tall man said, adjusting his spectacles.
"That doesn't really mean anything definitive," I said quickly. "They could have used a syringe to get it in deep."
He held one of the claws on the end of a wing to his mouth. "Yes, that's certainly plausible. And?"
I blinked. "And what?"
"Can you go deeper?"
"I... Obviously I can," I spoke defensively. I began going down the list. "The cutlery could have been poisoned instead. That's basic."
"True. And?"
"O-Or the chair," I said. "They could have put poison on the handrests."
"Plausible," he said, "though the culprit would have to have observed the victim licking their fingers or touching their food with reliable enough frequency to use such a method confidently. And?"
My face was starting to get a little flushed. (Not in an erotic way. I just want to be completely clear, I was not attracted to the bird man, regardless of the intellectual tension in our interaction. I know there are some women, well, you know, even if they're not normally into men, if it's sort of abstracted by them being some kind of weird creature, that can be appealing... but I don't do that. I'm just not into that sort of thing at all. Gods-- there's no way I can phrase this without it sounding like conspicuous denial. Forget I said anything.) "Our only source on the nature of the poison used is the doctor. Since he seems a little unreliable, it could actually have been a weapon."
"Unreliable?" He protested. "That's--" He coughed roughly, and wiped his brow, which seemed to be quite sweaty. "...rather rude. It's a complicated process to test for strychnine. You have to use the Mandelin reagent precisely--"
"What sort of weapon, if I might ask?" The bird interjected.
"Maybe a... dart," I suggested. "Or something someone prodded her with while passing by, or even from underneath the table." I paused. "I'll admit this one isn't very likely."
He let out a hum, inclining his beak. "Still, it's not impossible. And?"
"If it is strychnine, it already came up that it's slow-acting. She could have been poisoned before everyone even took their seats. Maybe she had a glass of water then, too, or even just shook the wrong person's hand, or something."
"So the range of suspects would expand to everyone she spoke to in the lead-up to the meal," he mused. "And?"
"It could have been on the glass she was drinking from. That would implicate whoever set the table."
"And?"
"It might not have been a poison at all," I speculated, straining. "She choked, and there are other ways to kill someone via asphyxiation. It could have been an allergy; an ingredient into multiple items that only she'd have a reaction to." Would allergies exist in Dilmun? It was a little difficult to imagine anyone being attached to hayfever in the way I was attached to wearing glasses.
"And?"
"Or maybe a physical object, something that literally obstructed her airway," I floated. "Or-- It's possible it wasn't even a murder, even. She could have just choked on her food, and we're all reading too much into it."
"And?"
"I... If the culprit had accomplices, they wouldn't have needed to even poison the original food," I managed after a moment. "They could have just brought one of the items - probably a hash brown, those are the most interchangeable - with them after poisoning it in advance, had their accomplice create a distraction for a moment, then just swapped just one already on their plate with it."
"Mm, not bad." He gave a small nod. The doctor coughed again in the background, leaning back against the table. "And?"
And? And what? This is bullying!
I glanced at the corpse to see if she was wearing makeup so I could try the lipstick theory. She wasn't. (Again, why would you?) Neither was she wearing nail polish. This drove me into crackpot territory. "If we imagine some kind of mechanism that releases the poison under certain circumstances, the culprit could have acted even earlier by sneaking it into her clothes. M-Maybe you'd have a pocket of the poison at the bottom of her dress, and when she sat down, it'd be forced by the pressure up a tube, or something, to come out near her hands in a little spray. It's natural for your hands to get a little damp when you're at a dining table. You might not even notice."
"That's against the rules," Koni complained. "You have to do it at--"
"And?" He was once again spoken over.
"She... She could have died of something completely unrelated, like a stroke," I tried desperately. "And just happened to choke at the same time, probably because she was shocked."
"And?"
And nothing. All that still came to mind was unforgiveably stupid; contrivances like trained insects, wild guesses that relied on mannerisms (scratching her head, etc) she might not have even had, or nitpick variants of ideas I'd already raised. But what was he expecting? I'd made nearly fifteen suggestions.
He's probably just trying to put me on the spot because I'm undermining his bit, I concluded. How rude!
By now, the playful, half-roleplaying atmosphere of a few minutes ago had fizzled out almost completely. Everyone, including Seth and Kamrusepa, were just staring at the two of us. Most were enthusiastic, a few were concerned or annoyed right alongside me, if not for the same reasons.
"...is that not fundamental enough for you?" I finally asked. The doctor coughed, this time hoarsely, for a third time.
He let out a small chuckle. "To the contrary, you were much more perceptive than one would normally expect for a new initiate. Your enthusiasm for the topic is clear." He withdrew a little, looking towards the corpse. "Indeed, you were rightly skeptical of many unspoken assumptions. The origin of the victim's food. The nature of the murder weapon. Whether what occurred was deliberate murder. And as you pointed out, precisely when the crime actually took place. All of these are questions that go beyond what was being discussed." He advanced towards it. "But there is an assumption even more core than these which you should have begun with. That is how all reasoning must begin: At the point where there is first doubt."
This was really annoying. I knew this already! That was the whole idea of the 'what do I know beyond all doubt' thing. The only reason I answered the way I did was because this whole thing had just been a series of ambushes.
But what was he talking about right now though, I wondered regardless. What did I miss. Was it something dumb.
Kamrusepa, who at least knew me well enough to get a sense of when I was unhappy, was looking at me worriedly. She'd probably been hoping this little misadventure would be more of a hit. She tentatively began to approach me as the bird man spoke up again.
"The premise I refer to, of course, is whether the victim is in truth a victim at all."
What does he... oh, right.
"What do you mean, detective...?" The damsel asked, attempting to reassert her bit now that my moment in the sun seemed to be fading. "You-- You're not saying that Zola killed herself, are you? She would never?"
"Doctor," the detective said, turning towards the other man. "Are you feeling quite alright? You seem to have developed something of a itchy throat."
"Ah, yes, I..." His face was red now, I noticed, and sweat was pouring down his face and neck in abundance. He seemed to be having trouble holding himself upright. "I'm not sure... I seem to have..."
Right on cue, he collapsed to his knees, dry-heaved, and then fell to the ground outright. People made noises of alarm, including the damsel, who glanced around hesitantly before screaming a second time.
The 'great detective' swept quickly down, taking his pulse. "As I feared, we're already too late. He appears to be suffering from alkaloid poisoning."
The man with glasses put a hand to his mouth. "The meat! Of course!"
"Indeed," the bird said gravely. "Touch alone is enough, in great enough quantities."
"Waitwaitwait," Koni said. "You're telling me-- Oh, ohh I get it, the murder--"
"I don't understand!" The damsel declared. "Just what are you saying? What's happened?!"
"A moment, please," the bird detective said, holding up one wing as he gestured towards the victim with the other. He brought one of his giant creepy eyes close to her face, the eyelid shifting open telekinetically in accord with the movements of his claw, which he then moved to her neck to check her pulse. Slowly, he nodded. "Yes, it's as I suspected."
Well, I can at least get a little revenge by undercutting his moment too. "She's not actually dead."
A few people, even including Mei, gave me disapproving looks, which struck me as a bit of a double standard - but the man himself took it in stride. "Indeed," he said with a firm nod. "Though it's very subtle, and easily missed if not aware of the complication, she maintains a slight but regular pulse. A classic case of self-administered tetrodotoxin."
The damsel affected shock poorly. "What?"
The detective stepped to the side, addressing the group at large. "The answer is this: The true culprit in this affair is none other than miss Zora Khurram herself. During the breakfast, she identified an item at the table that only she was eating, and doused it in poison. Then, once the meal had proceeded for long enough to make it plausible that she herself could have been easily poisoned, imbibed a nerve agent to place herself in a state akin to death. All of this, she did to engineer the death of Mister Bellman." He pointed to the doctor - this was his name, apparently. "Knowing that he was the practicing physician at the table today, she also knew that he would be forced to try and determine the cause of death, and that he would inevitably touch the roast. Ultimately, quite straightforward."
"That's incredible!" Mei said. "How did you know that, without even investigating the scene yourself?"
He shrugged. "Simple motive-oriented reasoning. Before 'dying', Miss Khurram pointed at her roast. Beyond contrivance, there are only two reasons I could think of to explain why she did this. The first is the obvious: That she believed she was poisoned by it. However, considering this for a moment makes it feel unlikely - after all, her plate was covered in half-eaten items from across the spread. There would be no reason to single that one out in particular unless she'd notice someone having interfered with it, but if she had, why would she not point to them, instead? Indeed, it's a very odd gesture for someone in their death throes to make under any circumstances." He held his claw upward, as if he were a teacher indicating an item on a blackboard. "And once you eliminate that possibility, only one remains: That she wished to draw attention to it for another reason. And... well, if you'll pardon me a little meta reasoning, there's only one thing that often happens at the breakfast table here." He looked downwards, at Zora directly. "How about it? Am I on the money?"
An awkward moment passed as he stared at the woman's if-not-dead-then-clearly-unconscious body, but then her eyes flicked open as if nothing was wrong. She let out a small sigh. "Yeah, you got me."
The group broke into applause along with smiles and laughter. Zora rose back upright, then prodded the doctor, who after a moment chuckled and did the same, dusting himself off. All remaining pretense vanished, and everyone instantly transitioned into dissecting the fiction openly. The damsel (who turned out to be named 'Mary') asked everyone for feedback on her performance, Zora confessed to having approached the doctor in advance out-of-character and asking him to play the buffoon a bit so her idea could work, and everyone else crowded around the bird man and eagerly expressed how good it was to see him and that they wished he'd come around more often - everyone except for Mei and Seth, the former urging the latter to make some kind of connection himself.
Despite being a newcomer, it seemed as though I'd been effectively forgotten. It bothered me more than I thought it would. I wasn't sure if I felt stupid for not having guessed the trick, or annoyed that the trick itself was dumb. Regardless of how you justified it scientifically (or, indeed, whether she'd actually taken anything of the sort for real), a fake-your-death potion felt like kind of tropey and lame. I had seen it in mysteries before, obviously, but it wasn't something my mind would ever have leapt to under normal circumstances, even if the way he'd deduced her setting the trap was a little clever.
Also, wasn't it a plot hole that the doctor had concluded she's been poisoned in the first place, let alone by a specific substance? Had that been metagaming, her asking him to be stupid in a specific way that served her purposes? Or was it a reasonable misunderstanding to have reached from the symptoms? Tetrodotoxin was a paralytic; if you were really stupid, like total layperson stupid, you could maybe mistake muscles that had just convulsed for that.
Or maybe it was just an unspoken rule here that the methods were allowed to be a little contrived. If they did this multiple times a week, the whole thing was probably more of a fun ritual than anything truly substantial; people coming up with the most out there methods that could still surprise others. It was probably silly to expect anything all that deep.
Kamrusepa, who I'd almost forgotten was beside me, let out a sigh. "Well, that was a bit of a wash." She looked to me. "Sorry that you were put on the spot like that. It's usually a more drawn out back-and-forth."
"It's... fine, I guess," I said. "Who is this guy, though? Why's he got everyone so worked up?"
She put her hands on her hips, surveying the scene at remove like some battlefield commander of old. "He's one of, if not the oldest and most reputed scholars of the Manse. His involvement predates both this Domain and the one I spoke to you of earlier - and the instances of most everyone here, for that matter - and he's responsible for many of the theories that remain predominant to this day, though it's difficult to say how much is his own scholarship and how much are texts he merely preserved from past eras."
"What kind of theories?"
Kam hesitated, then shook her head. "It's all too esoteric to explain to you just yet. If I were to say 'High Priestess second act role shift preference', you wouldn't even understand what I meant."
I frowned. "Assuming the people who think it isn't even about the conclave in particular aren't somehow correct, why wouldn't I be able to understand that? Don't the different characters just correspond to us?"
She squinted at me. "Didn't you read the document I sent you?"
"No, I didn't," I said bluntly, missing perhaps the only chance that'd ever come in my life to drop an aloof 'I skimmed it' like we were in a drama.
She rubbed her brow in theatrical exasperation. "The characters in the books don't correspond to us, per-se," she explained. "You'd determine that yourself relatively quickly if you spent a few months reading them. The implicit interpersonal relationships they have aren't consistent enough for that to be the case."
"What do they mean, then...?"
"It's a bit difficult to put into words." She raised a finger to her lips in thought, her eyes wandering upwards. "The term that gets thrown around is 'role', but that doesn't cover it, not quite. It's not per-se a matter of motivation either. It's sort of..." She paused for a moment. "Imagine that you're some kind of space alien viewing a game of chess. Without knowing the rules - or the cultural context of the pieces designs - in advance, instead of understanding each piece as bound by a set of universal rules, which in this analogy can represent individual personhood, you might instead only observe patterns in how they move, and categorize them in retrospect. That's the best way to think of it; post-hoc categorization."
"Why would it work like that? That's so... abstruse."
Kam raised her eyebrow. "A question for your demiurgic friend the next time you encounter her, perhaps."
I squinted. The word 'role' had come up with her and her servants a lot. Maybe this was part of the aberrant way she claimed to understand reality at first, but the Manse felt too hospitable in some ways - like the eternal supply of food and recreation material - to have been entirely wrought from the seizure of an idiot god. This felt difficult to understand on purpose.
"She probably wouldn't even explain if I asked," I replied. "She's not been forthcoming about the nature of this world, much, except the stuff that relates directly to our class. And even that seems a little sketchy."
She raised a brow. "I still don't understand why a being of such a nature would even try to deceive you. It happened once in regard to the hourglass already, so I don't doubt it, but what could she stand to gain?"
I sighed. Obviously I had some ideas about that at this point, based around her apparent interest in me as an individual, but it wouldn't do any good to speculate. "Does he have a name?" I asked, once again nodding towards the bird.
"No. It's as you heard; he's just known as the Great Detective."
"But presumably he has some kind of real identity." I hesitated for a moment, zoning out a little. "He looks like a... Primary. I think."
Kam's irritated countenance reversed, and she smiled brightly. "Oh, would you look at you! You're getting the hang of it already."
"Don't be infantalizing," I said flatly.
She chuckled, then looked back at the group. "But yes, he must have an original persona, and I suspect even one he uses in other circumstances here on the Stage. But he's been very circumspect about it. He only appears a few times a year, on average, and if he makes use of the mainstream Domains he's at least smart enough to separate his visits with long periods of privacy. No one's been able to find any patterns by looking at travel to and from the Crossroads, for example."
Wow, it's not just in the 'Reflection' that people here are really advanced when it comes to stalking, huh.
"In any event," she continued after a moment, "however much credit he can claim for the research, he is, at least, provably quite good at solving fictional mysteries. Hence the label, and his more immediate popularity."
Now that the game was over, the crowd around him seemed to only be growing, some people who didn't participate and were now finishing breakfast wandering over as well, including Isaac and Lucy, the former of which was giving him as enthusiastic a greeting as I could imagine from someone with that kind of stuffy disposition.
Kamrusepa reacted to this poorly, lowering her voice. "Look at them, trying to cosy up to him with their crackpot nonsense. He's historically been rather pragmatic, but he's been spending more of his visits with the bloody metaphysicists lately, since Lucy there has dragged them kicking and screaming into the mystery novel subculture against Isaac's will. I want to believe he's too sensible to truly go in for it, but, well, look at him."
"Why does he look like a bird?" I asked. "Or like, a weird half-bird. It looks uncomfortable."
"I'd assume it's a pun," Kam speculated. "You know, when you have a group of crows--"
"Oh," I said, then stuck my tongue out. "Ugh."
Kam patted on my back. "Well, chin up. I still think you put up a good showing, and there'll be more chances." She gestured back to the table. "For now, want to finish breakfast?"
I sighed. "Sure."
We went back to the table, resuming our meal. Suffice it to say, after all that, my moment of self-understanding was pretty decisively ruined. I couldn't think about anything but the stupid trick, and the even dumber ideas I'd floated before taking that shot in the dark. It wasn't even a matter of ego or impressing people, exactly, it just would have been really satisfying if I could have cut that whole interrogation off by pulling the answer out right off the bat.
At least the other people seemed genuinely impressed by him solving it so fast, I thought. So even in Dilmun, most self-proclaimed mystery fans still just cruise based on hunches. I guess that's one arena where I'm not completely in the dust.
Kamrusepa made a little more idle conversation about the breakfast murder tradition and the various ways they liked to mix it up - apparently I'd come on a relatively 'normal' day as opposed to one with something wackier like theme murders or massacres of esoteric restrictions, which was part of why Kam had been so eager for us to participate - but I didn't really absorb much of it, eating my food mindlessly. I felt hungrier than I'd realized at first. Maybe Kasua's body had more of a natural appetite than I did.
I didn't even notice when the shadow fell over us from behind.
"A word, if you don't mind, Miss Sharoni."
Kamrusepa looked back over her shoulder in annoyance, and I almost choked on my pork. When I turned my head, the figure's beak was already a foot and a half away from my nose, causing me to shift uncomfortably back.
"Detective," Kamrusepa said flatly. "Is there something we can help you with? The two of us were just wrapping up our meal. I'm giving a tour, so we're on a bit of a tight schedule."
"A tour? Even more of a newcomer than I'd assumed, then." He let out a low chuckle. "Forgive the interruption, Miss Mursilsduttar. I just wanted to extend a simple offer."
I glanced off to the side. Over where the discussion had been happening, the group remained largely congregated, looking in our direction with a mix of confusion and curiosity. The impression I got was that he had just excused himself on a whim.
Meaning he's put me on the spot for the second time in the past 15 minutes. Great.
"W-What kind of offer," I stammered guardedly.
"It's a very rare thing of late, to meet a native who has developed an interest in this matter," he stated, his tone a little less intense and more friendly than it had been a few minutes earlier. "I especially have not witnessed such a case in many years. I'm something of an old hand, here, so I was wondering if you might be willing to speak privately for a few moments. There's some advice I could offer which you might find useful."
"Um." I said. I took a moment to swallow the ham that was still in my mouth. "I'm... good, I think, thanks. Like Kam said, I'm here for the day... I kind of want to stay focused on, uh, our plans."
He tilted his head. "You're sure?"
Kamrusepa, who was within my line of sight but slightly out of his, shook her head subtly.
Wait, what's that supposed to mean? Does she want me to do it or not?
I hesitated. "How long would it take?"
"Only a few minutes, I'm sure," he told me. "I'd only ask you to walk with me around one of the bioenclosures. Nothing that ought to impact your schedule overmuch."
My lip curled. I peered at his creepy bird face suspiciously.
Oh, fuck it.