02:10, Werner-Szeto Academy Of Fine Arts Parking Lot, Fort Canning Road, 31 Jan 2075
The Werner-Szeto Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 2051 by James Werner, a British-Singaporean director renowned for his original theatre plays, and Szeto Wei Xiang, a Singaporean poet and artist, with the goal being to ensure that Singapore does not lose its passion for the arts even as the country’s progress into technology accelerated over the years. Ever since then, it has become a prestigious school for those seeking a future in arts and literature, to the point where some of its alumni consists of award-winning directors and writers from all around the world.
Right now, however, the school was a crime scene. A number of police officers had already secured the scene as the Third Investigation Squad arrived with Hai Yue and Ismail.
“Wow, this place… Brings back quite a bit of memories,” Ellen commented as she stepped out of her vehicle and stared at her former school.
“You wanted to become an actress before joining the police, no?” Shankar asked.
“Yeah… I’m not even sure what made me change my path, but after graduating, it just felt like the right move.”
“I suppose so… All right, guys, here’s what we’re going to do. “Joel, you and I will stay on the ground floor and do a search of the area with Ismail’s assistance.”
“Got it. Ismail, hey, we need your help…”
“Shawn, you go with Zai and Ellen and head to the second floor where the death occurred. Take Hai Yue with you all.”
“Roger that, boss.”
02:20, Werner-Szeto Academy Of Fine Arts Elevator Lobby, Second Floor, Fort Canning Road, 31 Jan 2075
It didn’t take long for Shawn and the others to reach the scene of the crime, where Sergeants Tom Ang, who had a piece of gauze bandage taped to the left of his forehead, and Miguel de Souza, whose left arm was wrapped in a bandage, were adjusting police tape around the elevator lobby.
Ang immediately wrinkled his nose when his former army squad mate approached, asking, “Why the hell do you and the others smell of decomposing corpses, Shawn?”
“Was helping First Squad deal with Hamood Razali. You know, the actor-turned-necromancer?”
“Let me guess: At a cemetery?”
“Yeah, lots of undead and shit, but we got him in the end… So, what happened here?”
“Standard violent Othersider incident. Miguel, show them.”
Miguel de Souza, whose right arm was also bandaged with the sleeve on his uniform slightly torn, gestured towards the elevator which had been jammed with a wedge to prevent it from going down. Inside was a security guard, slumped against a wall with the top half of his uniform stained with blood.
“The victim’s name is Tan Xun De, 46 years old. He’s been the security guard of the Academy for over ten years. Cause of death is massive blood loss from a ripped-open throat,” De Souza explained as Shawn and Ellen went over to examine the corpse.
“Ripped open? Looks more like someone skillfully slit his throat with a bunch of scalpels all at the same time,” Ellen commented.
“Sounds surgical… I heard a burglar broke into the academy and found him like this, fled the building and flagged you both down. The burglar would rather let himself be arrested than not report a murder?”
“I think he doesn’t want us to think he’s the one who did it. Either way, he took us to the scene where we all got jumped by that thing over there,” Ang replied as he pointed to another corpse that laid near the window, “Managed to hit it in the head when it was taking flight, I think.”
Zai went over and, using his feet, flipped the corpse over and grimacing at the sight of its horrible appearance.
“Ah, fuck. It’s definitely a pelesit.”
“That’s a pelesit? Looks hideous,” Hai Yue commented.
“You’ve never encountered something like this before?” Zai asked,
“Never, but I know of them. They’re familiars brought into existence by dark magic. Some bunians that strayed from the right path keep pelesits of their own back on the Other Side. But why does it look like a decomposing female corpse fused to a grasshopper? I thought they’re supposed to look like horribly disfigured female ghosts when in their True Forms.”
“I’m guessing Sergeant Ang shot it when it was halfway turning back into its grasshopper form,” Zai commented as he bent down to inspect the dead pelesit, “Pelesits can’t die unless they have been abandoned by their masters instead of being passed on and are unable to latch onto a new one. VOID uses silver bullets blessed by the ten main religions of Singapore but high chances are that this pelesit is just incapacitated at the moment. Still, why did a pelesit kill this security guard? Pelesits have very limited free will, they live only to follow their master’s orders to the letter... Someone wanted the guard dead.”
“Or maybe the guard got in the way?”
“Perhaps, but when a pelesit is ordered to target someone, they tend to leave everyone else alone. That’s what I was told, anyways. Grandmother used to scare me silly with those horror stories…”
“So, do we bring both the pelesit and the victim back to base along with the burglar?” Ang asked.
“I guess so. Dr Moyo’s not going to be pleased about it, though. He’s still clearing out the bodies of the Scorpions gangsters that our shark friend left in the wake of his rampage… Families refusing to claim the dead and what not,” Shawn replied.
“All right, Tom, you and Miguel get them both into body bags for transportation. Make sure your colleagues use HQ-issued silver chains and talismans to seal the body bag with the pelesit in it,” Zai said, “Me and my guys will do a sweep of the area, see if we can find anything else.”
“First, let’s get Ellen out of whatever trance she’s in,” Shawn added as he pointed at Ellen, who seemed to be staring into the corridor in front of them with a dazed expression.
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“Ellen, you good?”
“What- Oh, sorry, just reminiscing on my days as a student here… My classroom is the third on the right, not far from the staff room.”
“I’m guessing your educational years must have been pretty fulfilling.”
“There’s memories, good and bad. I've got memories that fill me with joy even today, but also some that brings me regrets.”
“I see... By the way, this security guard, do you know him?”
“He’s the night security officer. I think he joined around the same time I began my education here in this school but I’ve only interacted with the day security officers during that time. I didn’t even know his name until today.”
“Hey, guys, I found something,” Zai called out.
Ellen and Shawn turned to see Zai and Hai Yue collecting something from the vents into a petri dish.
“What do you have there?”
“Ectoplasm,” Zai replied as he sealed the dish, now containing a translucent, brown slime of unknown origins, and taped the lid to the dish, “One thing that old Ghostbusters movie got right was how ectoplasm comes in the form of slime.”
“I’m guessing the pelesit came in from the vents. Now we need to figure out how it got close enough to kill the victim,” Hai Yue added, "Hopefully, Shankar, Joel and Ismail are having better luck finding clues downstairs."
02:47, Werner-Szeto Academy Of Fine Arts Parking Lot, Fort Canning Road, 31 Jan 2075
“Run back the footage,” Shankar said to a police techie who had managed to access the security camera controls in the guard post with Joel and Ismail standing behind them.
“Just give me a moment, sir, pulling footage back to 0055 hours… There.”
On the footage, the victim, the security guard, could be seen going up the elevator and reacting to someone as the doors opened. He did not exit the elevator, but instead greeted what appears to be a man in a pale green shirt and dress pants with a red tie who joined him in the elevator, making small talk with them before the two exited. What neither men in the elevator seemed to realize is that something resembling a wisp had also entered the elevator, staying inside while they left.
Three minutes later, the security guard re-entered the elevator, completely unaware of the wisp that had transformed itself into a female entity who then reached out to the guard’s neck and did something that caused him to grab his throat, fall to the ground and looked as though he ws struggling to breath, with pools of blood starting to form around him.
“Oh, shit…” Joel uttered
The footage continued to show the guard struggling as the elevator doors opened, but the guard only managed to crawl halfway out before he finally ceased all movement while his killer turned back into a wisp and seemed to disappear.
“Okay, what about the other camera? The one at the lobby?”
The techie switched to another camera, time-stamped 0124 hours, which showed another male sneaking through the academy until coming across the dead guard at the lobby, causing him to panic and ran down the stairs and out the building. Other camera footage revealed how he failed to scale the front gates at the parking lot before breaking into the guard post to open it via the controls, just as a VOID patrol car used by Tom Ang and Miguel de Souza came into view.
“He really flagged them down,” Shankar commented.
“And according to the other officers, he immediately confessed he was a burglar and that he had came across a murder,” Ismail added as the techie went back to the elevator lobby camera on the second floor which showed the burglar bringing Ang and De Souza to the dead guard and the two sergeants quickly conducting a quick inspection of the scene.
“So De Souza was inspecting the corpse and Ang was interrogating the burglar…”
The footage now showed Ang and the burglar suddenly being knocked over by the same entity that murdered the guard and had been hiding in the dark corner of the lobby. The entity then jumped onto the burglar and started strangling him as Ang and De Souza tried to pry it off him, only for Ang to be thrown head-first into the ceiling. As Ang landed on the floor holding his head, De Souza began attacking the entity with his baton, finally prying it off the burglar who quickly scampered towards a nearby wall trying to catch his breath. De Souza is then seen trying to fight the entity on his own until it struck his arm, causing him to drop the baton as he fell backwards just as Ang, having recovered from his pain just enough to pull out his sidearm, fired one at the entity. The entity is then seen tying to escape, but Ang fired three more times at it, finally landing a headshot resulting in the entity dropping face-down straight to the floor.
“Shit, must have been real intense for those two. They rarely have to go toe-to-toe with Othersiders while on patrol,” Joel commented.
“I must say, they held their ground pretty well. But why did that thing seem to target the burglar in particular?” Ismail asked.
“Good question. We should ask the burglar once he’s taken back to HQ,” Shankar said, “Corporal, rip as much of the footages as possible and have it sent to us.”
“Yes, sir,” the techie replied as he took out a data-mining device and a hard disk from his utility belt.
“Zai reports that they’re bringing both the victim and the pelesit down in body bags for transfer to HQ,” Joel said as he saw a message on his phone.
“Good. We need to find whom the pelesit belongs to and find out why the guard was killed, as well as the burglar’s role in it since the pelesit specifically targeted him as well.”
“If a pelesit is out doing something for its master, then the latter should not have been far,” Ismail explained as the three left the guard post.
“What are you proposing?”
“I’m going to check the area around the academy, see if I can pick up any particular scent or spot something out of the ordinary,” Ismail replied, but then he sniffed the air and rubbed his chin, continuing, “On second thoughts, maybe I won’t have to move far. There’s a strange scent, something unnaturally sweet.”
Getting on all fours, Ismail began moving like an actual tiger on the prowl. It would have been amusing for the unaware, except Ismail, being a harimau jadian, not only looked like a weretiger but also possesses a tiger’s senses, and this was actually how they hunt game back on the Other Side. Joel and Shankar followed him until reaching some bushes outside the Academy, where Ismail pulled something from within the bushes and got back up on his feet.
“What is a test tube doing here?” he asked as he held up what he had found for Joel and Shankar to take a look.
"There’s some kind of substance inside too," Joel observed, We should collect it for lab analysis.”
Panicked screams were suddenly heard, causing the three to turn only to see police officers quickly backing away, some even fleeing, a body bag that they had just brought down from the second floor. The body bag in question was jumping around like a crazed kangaroo until a pair of arms ripped their way out of the bag. Shocked, Shankar and Joel pulled their sidearms out while Ismail went into attack mode, claws elongating and legs bending in anticipation of pouncing as a feral snarl escaped his mouth. As the occupant finally freed itself from the body bag, the three, as well as all those gathered around, saw for the first time a pelesit in its monstrous form as it lets out an unearthly shriek.
“Take it down!” Shankar ordered, but there was a sudden commotion on the second floor of the Academy as well, and everyone looked up just in time to see Hai Yue, a blade of ice in her hands, jumping from the second floor window of the elevator lobby right onto the pelesit just as Ismail lunged forward.
It only took a couple of seconds, but everything seemed to happen is slow-motion. Ismail, in one lunge, cleared the distance from the academy’s gate to the middle of the parking lot where the pelesit was about to start a new rampage, seizing its entire neck in one of his huge hands and slamming it to the asphalt before hoisting it up into the air just as Hai Yue fell towards them, displaying superhuman agility as she somehow managed to perch herself on Ismail’s outstretched arm before immediately jamming her ice blade down the mouth and throat of the pelesit, giving it two twists to fully ensure that the pelesit is finally incapacitated.
Backflipping off Ismail’s arm, Hai Yue wiped some sweat off her brow as Ismail dropped the pelesit, with VOID officers rushing over to stuff the pelesit into a new body bag, quickly wrapping silver chains around it before a Chinese officer started sticking paper talismans all over the body bag.
“Hai Yue, everything okay down there?” Shawn, who along with Zai and Ellen were sticking their upper torso out the window of the second floor elevator lobby, called out to the Ninth Princess of the Night-Sea.
“Everything’s under control, don’t you worry,” Hai Yue replied, casually waving her hands at her human colleagues like as though this was completely normal to her...