Non-Peace Weekend - Investigation

[mockmods]

[Two weeks have passed since your arrival. The Researcher has delivered a pair of motives, promising to reward some or punish others if rule 7 is not enacted by the end of the week.]

[Today is Friday, the deadline for your incentives. There is no morning announcement today.]

[Maybe It's nothing, but you might notice a faint, odd metallic scent in the air as you exit your bedrooms this morning.]

[Proceed with caution, Participants.]

Comments

Foyer

[mockmods]

[There's a lot to unpack here so let's just throw out the whole guitar case.]

[mightdoriya]

[WELL, IT'S NEARBY...and since it seems like Rosa will be able to handle the actual body check (he might have emergency situation experience but he's never actually had to investigate a cadaver before), Izuku will eventually peel himself away from the more grisly scene. ...and possibly thrust himself into an even grislier one?? Who even knows, his pants are already covered in blood so it's not like it can get any worse.]

[mockmods]

[Well, there's two more obvious things Izuku could use to distract himself from the body. First is all the freaking mannequins we mentioned earlier. The second is- at first glance, it's just kind of a big pile of junk? A whole lot of scrap metal.]

[mightdoriya]

[The mannequins...are strange. Izuku had no idea all of these where even here, but despite their curiosity he doesn't go for them first. Let's check out the big pile of junk before that. Is it just that, junk? Or is there something else here to find?]

[mockmods]

[Well, pile of junk is both entirely accurate and slightly misleading. It definitely looks to be a deliberately constructed-]

[...What the hell is this thing.]

[It's. A whole lot of moving parts, looks like? Almost like some kind of Rube Goldberg machine. What's it even- is that a fucking bicycle wheel?]

[mightdoriya]

[...okay, there is a lot to unpack here, so Izuku is going to take a slight step back so he can look over the machine properly. Is it still intact as far as being a cohesive machine goes, or did being set off reduce it to nothing but a bunch of junk? And also, since this sort of mechanism immediately brings Izuku to a particular conclusion...would any of these parts happen to be bloody by any chance?]

[mockmods]

[It looks as cohesive as it's likely to ever be, yes.]

[And good guess, there is some blood spray on the machine, especially on that weird bike wheel thing.]

[mightdoriya]

[Just as he feared... He'll take a closer look at the bike wheel mechanism. How is this thing set up? Is it just a normal-ass wheel, or did someone beef it up for murdering purposes?]

[mockmods]

[The wheel itself is pretty normal-ish? But it is mounted on a swinging arm of some kind that looks like it could hit pretty hard.]

cw: decapitation talk

[mightdoriya]

[Ow. Not hard enough to decapitate someone the way Yaiba was done, he guesses? Not unless there's something sharp here that could hack through someone's spine... He shakes his head, trying and failing to get the image of that poor guy's mostly-decapitated head out of his mind. It's been burned into it, and it's something he's never going to forget. Is there anything else of note with the machine here?]

Re: cw: decapitation talk

[mockmods]

[The arm and bike wheel are entirely blunt, unfortunately. If they were involved in the Furry French Revolution, it wasn't on their own.]

[And the only other thing to note about the machine itself is that it's pretty ridiculously complex. If it weren't for the gore, it would almost look at home in a more steampunk Dr. Seuss book.]

[mightdoriya]

[It's not an answer then, but it's something. This machine was clearly devised to hurt someone, and it succeeded in some manner. The complexity of the machine stuns him, though. Someone had to have been working on this all throughout the week to be able to finish it, right? There's no way it could have been put together all in one day. And how did they get all of these parts without someone seeing them do it? Izuku takes another step back from the machine. Is there any way Izuku might be able to deduce from the design how it was meant to work? Was the swinging arm the final part to be set off, or is there more to it than that?]

[mockmods]

[It's pretty hard to tell, but it looks like the machine was mostly built around the arm. It's probably a decent guess that making it swing hard and fast was the point of it all.]

[You don't have to figure out the exact mechanics of a Rube Goldberg device to solve this case, is what we're telling you.]

[mightdoriya]

[Listen Izuku needs to be thorough! This thing was at least part of what hurt somebody, whether it was Yaiba directly or something else entirely. Anything else need to be checked out here, or are we good to move on to the mannequins?]

[mockmods]

[You're good! Go check those mannequins.]

[mightdoriya]

[TIME FOR A MANNEQUIN ADVENTURE Anything unusual going on here? Other than, you know, mannequins.]

[mockmods]

[For one, there's kind of a lot of them. And they all appear to have been beheaded.]

[doppelanger]

[ WELL, SHE'S HERE AND SHE'S READY TO MESS WITH A BODY but also, from experience, detectives can get really touchy when you, say, mess with their crime scene, or access their computer and move photos on their serial killer wall around, or kind of graze their ear with a bullet. She pauses, then says: ]

I am going to kitchen. Call if you have knife questions, please.

[ Which is all you get out of her until, however many minutes later, she comes out with bloody hands and forearms, doublefisting four big, bloody kitchen knives. And after an "excuse me" to anyone nearby, she'sefinitely going to crouch over the body and eyeball the neck wound if nobody stops her, Sonia's already done it so why not. ]

[aragona]

[She talked to Yaiba once but she's not all that upset about his death. She's just sticking around the body since she's curious as to what he was.

So from crouching over his head, is there anything that sticks out?]

cw; decapitation, gore

[mockmods]

[There's blood on his face. My god, there's blood EVERYWHERE!]

[Which isn't too surprising, given the deep nature of the wound. His head is almost, but not completely, severed.]

cw decapitation talk

[aragona]

[Oooh.

She's going to ignore Rosa's warning and poke at the remaining skin and meat that connects the neck to the body. How close was the killer to total decapitation?]

Re: cw decapitation talk

[mockmods]

[Pretty close. Whatever did this got a good portion of the way through, but couldn't quite make the final cut.]

[aragona]

[It's difficult to get a clean cut, yeah. But how clean is this? Does it look like someone did this in one go or were they sawing at his neck?]

[mockmods]

[It's actually a little hard to tell? There's mostly one big cut, like a single strike, but it's also sort of jagged, like there was additional damage at some point.]

AREA CLEAR

[mockmods]