“Hey, do any of you two have a spare knife I can borrow?” Shaula asks.
“Uh, I do, actually…” Sigvor says, cautiously. She takes out the decaying knife from her pocket. “What do you need it for?”
“I want to do some collecting. Pieces of their hair, clothing and skin. I can maybe figure out a way to use that for… Well, again, the less you know…”
“Oh, then this knife wouldn’t be good for that.” Sigvor realizes, carefully switching it out for her trusty, normal knife.
“That knife looked good enough, didn't it? What’s wrong with it?” Shaula asks, unsure why Sigvor is switching knives. The knife that Sigvor had shown her was quite sharp and it looked perfect for making clean cuts. It had a unique smell to it, one that she couldn’t quite recognize. She actually had noticed a similar smell coming from one of the bodies in this hallway.
Hm, looks like one of these guys is carrying a knife like that one too.
“I grabbed it from one of the cult members actually. It’s apparently a knife that leaves a decay effect on whoever is cut by it. Probably not the best thing to be used to gather evidence with, who knows what it’ll do.” Sigvor smiles awkwardly.
“I see…” Shaula says, softly. “Hm, that knife… It has a very distinctive smell. Hold on…”
Shaula looks at a man lying face down on the ground. She grabs the back of the man’s shirt with her left hand and picks him up off the ground as if picking up a soft pillow. Mrs Litun and Sigvor are surprised by her extraordinary strength. She grabs the man’s knife holster from his belt and finds a similar knife, one with an identical blade edge and a different sized handle.
She holds it in her hand and smells it closely. There is a loose smell of blood still on the blade but aside from that, there is a scent exactly like the blade in Sigvor’s hand. The uniqueness of its scent is valuable to her. If these cult members use these blades, they would be much easier to pinpoint by the scent of the blade instead of by hair or skin samples.
If their cult were to move locations, then any hair and skin samples from old members would only lead her to dead ends. But, they would be carrying their blades everywhere they went. Even if they cleaned off blood, they wouldn’t be able to clean off the blade’s natural scent.
“Wait, Sigvor, you said it has a ‘decay’ effect? What does that mean exactly?” Shaula asks.
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“Well…” Shaula notices Sigvor turn her eyes towards Mrs Litun for a moment. She sits there with a disheartened face. She realizes what must have been responsible for her face wound. She stares at the knife in her hands.
She feels sad for the woman but a part of her wants to use the knife to test out her healing. She is curious what this clearly magic effect will have on her own flesh. But, she doesn’t.
“I’m sorry, I think I understand.” Shaula says, not wanting Mrs Litun to feel more pain. She moves towards Sigvor and takes the normal knife out of her hands while placing the knife of decay she had just grabbed away for now.
Shaula started to take pieces of hair off of the bodies in this hallway, wrapping them up using some tissues from a pack that she was carrying. She also takes small pieces of skin off using Sigvor’s knife while Dzan and Sigvor watch with some discomfort.
"Will this really help you?" Dzan asks, creeped out by Shaula's forensic work.
"This? You know, where I'm from, the guards actually use hair and skin samples to help match criminals with their associates and their favorite locations, you know? Do guards have that kind of ingenuity in this city?" Shaula asks, cautiously.
She thinks about the forensic ability of the city guards in this city and nation. Do they have the ability to find people just based on fingerprint, DNA, blood samples, etc? She doesn’t know exactly so she thought she could nonchalantly ask.
“Honestly, if you’re not directly caught by a city guard, you’re basically safe. If they can use witness testimony to find you, you’re fucked. Do you know anymore, Sig?” Dzan asks.
“I’ve heard from friends of mine that they use special healers to match blood, spit, sweat, vomit and, I think, cum samples to other similar samples. So if you leave blood or spit or whatever at a scene, then they’ll be able to catch you if they can bring you in for a test and make you give your fluids. I think sometimes they use hair strands as circumstantial evidence, you know, like if it’s the same type and color. Other than that… not sure.”
Sigvor thinks for a while more but Shaula already gained some quite useful information. It surprises her how much Sigvor knows about forensics. From what it seems, they have some level of forensics at their disposal but otherwise, they’re maybe equivalent to detectives of the 19th century.
They’ll probably only find cold case culprits if they have guys as good as Sherlock and Watson. Although, those guys did solve a lot of cases… Best not leave anything incriminating here.
Shaula moves carefully, ensuring that she doesn’t leave any loose hairs or fingerprints on the bodies of the Twin Moon members she inspects.
In the first place, Shaula only needs these samples in case she cannot track other members of the Twin Moons by the scent of the decay knife she now has. It would be better to have the skin and hair samples as a redundancy. After a couple minutes, she collects everything that she needs in various crumpled tissues. When she gets back to her hotel, she can find a better method of saving these pieces of evidence.
The only thing she has to worry about now is how to dispose of these bodies or otherwise escape the area without being captured by the city guards.
She also wants to ask about something else. She remembers the vials that Dzan had shown her.