WEEK 7

[bathymetric]

Another Saturday gone and just like that you wake on Sunday, down five of your number. The largest dent taken out of you at once so far - it's surely noticeable, the head count being cut by a third. Almost enough to make you wonder how many of you will even be left by the next motive or two. Surely this isn't a sustainable rate for body counts to increase... right?

There's a new and, it looks like, final wing of the building to explore, bringing everything full circle. Maybe you'll get some more answers to some of the questions and mysteries of this place there - or at least, you can certainly hope for them. Time to turn your investigative eyes towards one last batch of rooms, who knows what you might find?

Angel remains around at night, her appearances much more common now that... well, she's certainly seen a downtick in necessary surveillance work, hasn't she? The app giving you a line to The Professor remains open, and well... whatever's going on with that ouija in the library continues to happen! You're not suffering from a shortage of leads, at least, even as things get more bizarre.

Something's going to have to give here, eventually. Right?



SUNDAY | MONDAY | TUESDAY | WEDNESDAY | THURSDAY

[ ooc: Welcome to your last player case week! AC is over here, regains as always are over here, and... well, enjoy! After this we get to take our big turn towards the Serious. ]

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SUNDAY

[bathymetric]

MONDAY

[bathymetric]

TUESDAY

[bathymetric]

WEDNESDAY

[bathymetric]

THURSDAY

[bathymetric]

MOTIVE

[bathymetric]

[ Despite the pile of bodies last week, it looks like you won’t be getting a reprieve from The Professor’s poking and prodding towards murder as his voice rings out on Tuesday like usual. ]

Meeting room, please. Some of you might actually like this one.

[ Once everyone’s gathered in the meeting room, you’re greeted by a bright flash from the screen that seems to fill the whole room in pure white. You can hear whispers of some kind under it, but it fades as quickly as it came. ]

This week, rather than threatening you, I’ve decided to give you a little reward. That flash should have partially undone the limitations put on your powers and abilities. They won’t work perfectly, but you deserve at least a little taste of normal by this point, don’t you? Don’t say I’ve never given you anything. And who knows? Kill and I might just give you back yours fully and then some.

[ And with that, he’s gone. Happy Tuesday?

As you try to access powers again, though, what he seems to have meant by “won’t work perfectly” is that they work, but they fluctuate greatly. Sometimes they function as normal, sometimes not at all, sometimes they’re just at full power without even being asked. Surely this won’t go wrong! ]

PUNISHMENT...? (1/2)

[bathymetric]

[ In the evening on Wednesday, something happens. It starts as a familiar something, to the events of several weeks ago - the same alarm starts to blare through the whole facility, making it impossible to completely ignore whatever it is that’s about to go down even if you want to. ]

Outside the meeting room, now.

[ It’s easy to see what’s supposed to be happening here - Angel staggers out of the meeting room, holding her hands up to her ears, but… walking as normal, not with the same puppeteered motions of the last time you saw her. Looks like someone was able to give her enough warning to prep some earplugs and ditch the earpiece she usually wears. That should make all of this a lot easier! ]

Hm. So, you want to die under your own power. That can be arranged, dear Guardian Angel.

[ There’s no small amount of venom dripping from The Professor’s words as he says them - he’s at “someone gave Nova a chainsaw” levels of angry at least.

Somewhere, in the background, you can hear the vault door open and shut. ]

You’ve broken the rules set forth for you, knowing the consequences of your actions. I am engaging the last of the Failsafe’s rules and relieving you of your position. Oh, Failsafe?

[ And, emerging from the north hallway… ]

investigation

[valentinus]

[ Well, Vincent was here and all, but he figured from the showing of everyone else putting forth their best efforts and their struggles he could start doing more to assist other than just...existing vaguely here. So for the first time in all of these weeks he was going to start doing some investigation!

The man will head into the statuary and begin to look around in the area, trying to first see if he could catch anything off at first glance before he'd go and do a more in-depth investigation.

Following that, the quiet man could be found at his usual haunts.

He will be hanging around in the bar, with a glass of some alcohol beside him, looking thoughtful, but relatively not very bothered. Someone might even say he was calm, even in the face of what happened, though maybe that wasn't it either.

It would be much quieter now. Especially with Anna gone. It will be strange to get used to.

Next place he could be caught at will be the garden. He practically seemed to live here now, but he had decided today to sit in front of the pond and to contemplate his existence as he stared into its watery depths. Anyone who came closer may get the comment: ]

...hard to believe it's been over six weeks.

investigation

[mouflon]

[ Rin gets up around noon, and when she does, the first place she goes is Anna's room. She had stopped there before sleeping after the party, and she had found her notes — but they hadn't been meant for her, and it had seemed wrong to take them. Still, there's... something to what's been written there, and Rin spends a while mulling over those last few sentences that were written, just before and just after Anna had killed.

Even if I feel other things now, care about other things again. It doesn't matter.

It was really too late for me before I even arrived in this place.

She puts the notes back where she found them. She doesn't touch the motive envelopes.

After that, Rin goes to the art room. Flowers from the garden feel impersonal to her, if she's really being honest, so she's hard at work folding paper flowers. The red and orange ones she makes are a simple shape—but aside from those, there are pink ones, too, cut into petals and glued back together in something closer to the shape of a rose. It seems like those are for a separate project, going by the way they've been set aside while Rin attempts to string the rest together.

(Rose's note to her, as short as it is, has been tucked away somewhere safe and private in her room.)

It's evening by the time Rin appears at the memorial. She isn't sure if she'll find somewhere to place either wreath of paper flowers; she leaves them lying on the floor until she can think of something better.

Finally, Rin winds up... the bowling alley. The sight of it puts a sour expression on her face; something this lighthearted feels like an insult now. But she might as well make the best of it, she thinks, and sets about investigating the new room. ]

Investigation!

[fivestagegod]

[So last night was. Bad. For a few reasons. He's actually going to be in his room for most of the day; exactly what he's doing in there is anyone's guess, but he's not in any of the usual places so it's pretty presumable that he's there.

That said, though, he'll come check out the new area eventually; he seems pretty spaced out, but he shakes it off when he sees the locked door. He still has that blue key with him; let's see what that gets him, shall we?

After that...well, it's a matter of stopping by the infirmary again, which is where he'll be for the remainder of the evening, getting well into nighttime. Checking stock, organizing things that don't need to be organized. Keeping himself busy and largely going through the motions, because whatever his head has decided to do today is deeply unpleasant and this is mindless and familiar and something he doesn't need to actually focus on to accomplish.]

investigation

[bathymetric]

[ Alright, so! The room is set up with a sort of island of statues in the center, with a walking path around them and a ring of statues around the edge of the room broken by the couple of doors leading out.

There's nothing immediately super out of place, but you can investigate further in either the island or the ring. ]

[valentinus]

[ Okay, let's try checking out the island first, here. Anything weird about these statues such as on their feet, backs, hands, whathaveyou? He will also make sure to look over at the empty pedestal to try to cover his bases in this portion. ]

investigation

[bathymetric]

[ It's fiiiiiine.

Okay, investigation! The room is sort of... well, there's the standard entry area with some benches and a place to grab shoes, a little dining area for the hell food the bowling alley comes with, a jukebox, and the lanes themselves. ]

[mouflon]

[ ...I'm severely tempted to have Rin start with the dining area just so she can be carrying around a plate of terrible nachos while she does everything else, so.

Let's rummage through the dining area! ]

Investigation!

[bathymetric]

[ Well, good news is the key absolutely works! The lights are off in this room, you're going to have to find a lightswitch, but the door is now open!

The first thing that hits you, though, is the smell! Not necessarily in a bad way, you haven't found, you know, A Pile of Bodies, but it's... honestly probably a familiar enough scent to you to place even with the tinge of dust that's crept in under it. There's some kind of heavy-duty cleaner you can still smell the barest hints of, along with maybe a few other chemicals...

Look, I'm just gonna level with you, Birkin, that's the smell of a laboratory. ]

[fivestagegod]

[...Oh.

Do you ever get the feeling that something is either about to be very good or very, very bad, because that is the feeling he's getting right now. It smells like the labs in the NEST; not like the ones in the mountains, those had the distinct unpleasantness of being underground with exposed walls, all rock and earth, but the NEST is like this place. All steel walls and windows and generally untouched by the nature happening outside of it, except in a few small places where...unpleasantness happened.

Great.

Well, since we just had the fucking tripwire case (thanks Anna) and his brain also very much associates this kind of scent with both traps and general impending death (thanks Umbrella) let's...see if we can find a light switch first, without going too far into the room. They're usually right by the door, kind of defeats the purpose otherwise?]

[bathymetric]

[ Alright! So the statues themselves aren't too weird - especially here they're mostly replicas of famous statues rendered in similar materials.

That said, it looks like there might be something in the middle of the island? ]

[valentinus]

[ Let's head to the middle! What's the weird going on here? ]

[bathymetric]

[ Rin you're so valid.

There's not a lot here, it's mostly just worth noting that the food in here has the same black hexagon branding as the food in the kitchen pantry. But if you want some nachos, Rin, there's enough here for A Lot Of Them. ]

[mouflon]

[ It's kind of weird that the food has a brand, albeit a vague and mysterious one, when the equipment down in the gym doesn't, isn't it??? She'll muse on this while she makes herself a large plate of nachos; she hasn't eaten much today and no one can stop her.

Anyway, since she's here, what's the next closest thing worth investigating? The jukebox? ]

[bathymetric]

[ You know, if one's only exposure to labs is the ones in Resident Evil, one would be alarmed, that's only healthy.

He can find a lightswitch pretty easily! And he'll find... well, it's not as horrifying as one might think! This room is a chemistry lab more than anything, and it's set up less like a collaborative workspace and more like a classroom, with a few rows of individual complete workspaces rather than any kind of specialized workstations. Most of them are cleaned up and under wraps, all the safety equipment and the like put back, though one of them near the back looks like it's been used - but nothing in here looks used recently, there's a thin layer of dust over everything.

Around the edge of the room, though, there are several notable things - both the usual (an emergency washing station, some cabinets full of supplies) and the unusual, particularly a corner of the room sectioned off by a number of thick bedsheets and a sliding automatic door near the back of the room through which you can see another glass door and a small area with light protective gear on the wall. ]

[fivestagegod]

[...This is. Fine? Giving him less war flashbacks and more weird memories of the training facility because everything in this place comes back to the training facility.

Okay. So let's start with the station that's been used; is there anything noteworthy about it, any indication of what was being worked on?]

[bathymetric]

[ It doesn't take the clambering it usually would with the David out of the way and otherwise occupied (so in a wild way this piece of evidence is made possible by Zelos), but there's a small cleared area in the middle of the statues, and in the middle of it someone has laid out some blankets and pillows. By the look of the dust on them, they've been here for a while. ]

[bathymetric]

[ That works! So the jukebox has an interesting sort of... hybrid system? There's a digital system for looking up your uh... pretty much any song from anyone's world, but there's also a disc system built in! Enter disc number and track and it'll play! But it's weird - half of the disc tracklists and album art or whatever seem to be missing? Just a loooot of blank discs. ]

[mouflon]

[ Does there seem to be any pattern to the order of blank discs? Or... An interesting number sequence if she notes which ones are missing? ]