FINAL INVESTIGATION

[bathymetric]

Good morning, passengers. You've made landfall.

The ship arrives at the shore of the island early in the morning, suddenly grinding to a halt for the first time in weeks. A ramp is lowered directly onto the beach, and The Captain almost immediately hops down it, laughing the whole while as he does. Jones stands on the ship, not following, and The Captain addresses you:

"Don't take too long! We have business in that lighthouse, you and I."

Without another word, The Captain heads towards a path on the beach that heads lighthouse-ward, but not before turning back again.

"And Jones! Head to your ship and ready the crew for when this is over."

Jones seems... not quite content to do this, whatever it is, but after a minute or so for any last conversation, he vanishes into a wall.

With both of your captors no longer on board, the ship is quiet. Its engines are stalled, the journey over. If you wish to survive the day, you're going to have to go onto that island and face The Captain once and for all.

But first... there are some areas you definitely haven't explored yet! If you're going to go in with all the information you need, might be time to take advantage of this situation...

Comments

[magycks]

[ Bookshelf, baby! Let's put the moi in grimoire. ]

[bathymetric]

[ Looks like a number of arcane texts on dark magic and voodoo. Your kind of scene, basically. ]

[magycks]

[ Nothing she'd recognize, though, right? No Grimoire Du Merlock up in this library?

Either way, are any of these visibly distinctive? Like, are there any cracked spines or books with bookmarks in them, anything that looks like it's been revisited multiple times? ]

[bathymetric]

[ Nah, nothing she knows. I mean... there might be non-duck-pun versions of duck-pun books? Maybe?

One of them seems to have a couple bookmarks in it - Remedies for Ailments and Enemies. ]

[magycks]

[ Time to pull that bad boy down and open it up, not unlike how she would treat Lelouch's doll if she had any idea what he was reading right now!! What's on the relevant pages? ]

[bathymetric]

[ First off appears to be instructions for the creation of voodoo dolls.

Most notably, it starts by finishing that rhyme Jack started:

Something of the head, something of the thread
Something of the body, something of the dead ]

[magycks]

Oh, come on, it doesn't even commit to the rhyme...

[ Does it specify the meaning of any of these components? Because a random dead duck is one thing, but if there's a piece of another De Spell on her right now, she would love to know! ]

[bathymetric]

[ The first three are pretty obvious - hair, clothing, spit/blood/whatever, but that fourth one?

Yeah, uh. All these bones came from various ancestors of you guys. ]

[magycks]

[ COULD BE WORSE... COULD BE RAVEN BONES...... but nobody else is going to be nearly as blase about it as Magica, probably, and even she's not happy! The family legacy is one of like three things she cares about! Oh well, she'll cross that bridge when she comes to it.

Anything else of interest on this page, or should she flip ahead? ]

[bathymetric]

[ Nah, not on this page. The other page of note is that cold remedy Lelouch found a while back. ]

[magycks]

[ Well, she's absolutely going to check every single title on the bookshelf (while just dumping each book she flips through on the floor afterwards), but that's just Magica being Magica! Is there anything else to find, or is she just getting some titles for a bit of nice light reading later on? ]

[bathymetric]

[ Well, in the middle of all of this, she will find... this bad boy! It's locked, though. ]

[magycks]

[ OH FUCK YES ]

Oh. There you are.

[ does she even know what the box looks like or remember that the heart is in a box? unclear, but it sure sounds vaguely threatening!

So, uh, how heavy is this bad boy... ]

[bathymetric]

[ Weirdly? A little heavier than you might expect, if there's just a heart in there.

Not too hard to carry, though. ]

[magycks]

[ Time to toss half the shit in her bindle out onto the floor so she can put this thing in there... RIP taser and essential oil bottle and literally all foodstuffs, we barely knew ye.

Liquor time? ]

[bathymetric]

[ Liquor time!

Well, uh. Something time - the liquor seems to have been mostly pushed aside in favor of some other ingredients. ]

[magycks]

[ Oh, good! What's in the cabinet? Surely this will be fine. ]

[bathymetric]

[ Well, they're currently low to empty, but we have...

- Kerosene
- Acetone
- Some kind of acid
- Rum
- Red food coloring
- Several empty packets of Stevia

And, perhaps most horrifyingly:

An empty stein that smells of all of them mixed together. ]

[magycks]

[ honestly by her reckoning this is the first truly cursed discovery in the room so far

Does it look... like there's any of those lip imprints a glass will get after being drunk from on the stein... is the inside still wet... ]

[bathymetric]

[ The inside is not still wet, but.... there may be some faint lip marks, yes. ]

[magycks]

[ And does it look like... any of the stuff that's been now marginalized in favor of Red Drink has been drunk from at all? Like, could a human being have possibly utilized this cabinet beforehand? Also if she, like, mixes all of the available ingredients together in the stein, is she going to kill both herself and Lelouch with fumes (probably for the best at the end of the day) or is she just going to get a horrifying concoction? ]

[bathymetric]

[ I mean... some of it for sure, but the dust collection doesn't fill you with hope, Magica.

Well, uh... you don't die of fumes! You create a little of something that smells like very strong alcohol, if you were the sort of person who felt alcohol also needed household chemicals for flavor. But things have definitely amalgamated into something!

... It seems to be eating through the bottom of the cup. ]

[magycks]

[ JESUS CHRIST OKAY!! LET'S JUST PUT THIS BACK IN THE CABINET ON THE BOTTOM SHELF AND GO BACK TO THE DOLLS...

She's going to snip off the threads and take all 7, for the record! And also rip out the voodoo doll instructions from the book. She and Lelouch should truly never have been given this much power. ]

[cethflayn]

[Oh my God, thank you Magica, I can't wait to not endanger Flayn when she inevitably needs to rip her own doll open to find Sothis's pinky bone in there]