Okay, I forgot a few things from the last time, so I just cut the last entry short. Good news! Other people helped me remember what happened. So I’ll tell you, now.
In the darkness, chaos reigned: people were panicking, stampeding and being shot by stray bullets. There was a terrible keening as of a soul in dire pain. Then suddenly, it was all over. Feeling their way around in the darkness, the survivors managed to raise the heavy curtains that blocked out the light and at least shed enough light on the ballroom that they could see what had happened.
They were able to find the bodies of their fellow attendees that had been on the wrong end of a stray bullet and witness the overturned display cases. But it wasn’t until the lights came back on that Leon was able to see the desiccated corpse of Dr Bronson. He rushed over and found a brittle dried husk, near to crumbling. The agonizing death was evident in the face drawn in an eternal scream. Leon pulled the corpse, its clothes untouched and undamaged, towards him, and checked its jacket pockets. He found a fob watch and a room key (shown here as the amazing prop Bryce made), but also caused the Dr’s shoulder to crumble to dust. The black canopic jar, now with its lid off and slightly chipped was empty. Shaken, Leon shielded the corpse from further view, looking to protect the sanity of his fellows.
Things weren’t much better on the dancefloor. Dorothy Frazer had caught one in the cloche and her brains were all over a horrified Larry Crosswell. Jimmy Beans, photo-journalist for the Providence Journal bought the farm as well as two other people they couldn’t identify AND one fella over on the side of the room who was gurgling his last from a hole in the throat. Terence went over to see if there was anything he could do, but there wasn’t. Also this was a guy who’d maybe just fired into a panicked crowd, so… no-one was going to try too hard to save him anyway. He left behind a practically still smoking Mauser with a few rounds left that the coroner carefully picked up and pocketed.
A brief inventory of the artifacts was conducted once it became clear that there was no-one left to save. Nothing appeared to have been stolen, although Leon pocketed the red jasper shabti figurine that had so beguiled him.
At this point the police arrived and locked everything down. The remaining Friends (of Abydos) sat tight and tried not to think about that blob that most had glimpsed in the flash of Jimmy Beans’ camera.
In walked Inspector Benjamin Drummond, large and in-charge. He organised the many flatfoots into processing the survivors of this fiasco as well as coordinating the cover story (cascading transformer blowouts on the roof) with the hotel manager. But he also spotted Leon, still in his naval dress whites and buttonholed him to assist with the investigation. He was the only available detective with a whole bunch of beat cops at his beck and call and he couldn’t be everywhere at once. A JAG would be a useful deputy and if he knew any other respectable citizens they could help, like that coroner over there. Amazingly, Timely Tom talked his way into this select group by pointing out that he was pretty familiar with the “back of house” of hotels.
Drummond was preparing to take the bodies to the coroner (the real one who works for Providence, not the Terence one who was merely visiting Providence) and he needed the last of the witnesses processed, the film in the cameras once belonging to Jimmy Beans developed, and ideally someone to find out more about this Dr Bronson.
Emil, Shea and Leon moved among the other witnesses trying to get a grasp of who may have been involved in the heist, while Tom lurked and dropped some eaves.
Wilbur descended to the second floor where the Sterling-Holmes wedding party was in full swing despite the “electrical incident” earlier. House photographer Flo Bishop was available and once she heard that this was a police matter she agreed to help develop the film from James Beans’ cameras. Wilbur could either stick around in the darkroom for an hour or leave her to it and check back in an hour. Either way, the door to the darkroom was getting locked as per normal procedure. He elected to leave Flo to her work and head back upstairs.
Terence, meanwhile, looked at the body that had once been Dr Bronson. He noted that her clothes were undamaged and that there were no signs of other damage other than… seeming to have aged 4000 years in the time it takes to scream all the breath out of your lungs. He ruled out express-mummification as the organs were obviously still in place, but noted that the jaw appears to have been broken by the strain placed on it by its final scream. He observed the tablet clutched in her bony grey hands, but did not attempt to remove it. He also saw grains of a black sand or grit near the feet of the cadaver. Leon had found similar grains in the canopic jar.
Everyone else was working the room. Emil talked to Coleman Reese, the insurance investigator, who’d been tipped off that something may happen at this exhibition and had come by to check it out. He’d heard rumours of an unopened canopic jar from the freshly cracked tomb of King Tut and knew that if it was true, it would draw the sharks.
Tom found one Miss Celia Shepherd trying to talk her way out of the line to be interviewed by the police, while Shea retraced the path of the woman who had been on stage with Dr Bronson right before the fateful camera flash. She actually did great at that, finding a busted acrylic nail (cue brief detour onto wikipedia to find out if they had artificial nails in the 1920s) that had got stuck in the heavy curtain screen when the wearer careened into the wall in a panic.
Leon, playing the good cop to the heavily implied bad cop who would take over if Miss Shepherd didn’t spill the beans, was now armed with enough angles of inquiry to break down her well-practiced zipped-mouth. She was part of a heist crew for Red Jim McLoughlin who has heard how valuable this unopened canopic jar could be.
Coleman Reese had estimated that the price on the illicit market for the unopened canopic jar was probably $300,000 at least, so it wasn’t too surprising that Red had tried what seemed like an easy smash and grab: put out the lights, have hoods cause a panic and have Celia in place to grab the goods before anyone can do anything about it.
As soon as the lights had gone down, Celia had dashed on stage, tried to grab the jar but fumbled it. She described the thing that came out of the canopic jar but can only describe it as both semi-fluid (like tar or molasses) and yet and tough and rough textured, (like the shells of marine creatures). She panicked, hurled the thing at Dr Bronson and bolted. She can’t get the greasy feeling off her hands and was rubbing them constantly. Now that it had gone wrong, what with all the dead people, and Red Jim McLoughlin without his expensive brain vase or whatever, Celia was very worried for her personal safety. It was not unheard of for Red Jim to “tidy up” after botched jobs or even jobs that got too hot.
Checking her remaining fingernails they found another small piece of black sand; Terence placed this in an envelope and pocketed it.
The coroner’s assistants had arrived to pick up the body, and Terence decided to offer his professional opinion on picking up the very dry body of Dr Bronson. This was resented by the proud and independent Rhose Islanders, and they ignored his presumptuous advice on how to do their jobs… ultimately accidentally snapping off Bronson’s arm. This did however free up the tablet she was holding which worldly Emil later translated. (I wouldn’t put too much stock in what he discovered YET as I’m pretty certain I handed Rolland the wrong handout. It’ll all get resolved, but for now know that the unhelpful nonsense will make sense later.)
After the remaining attendees had been talked to, Wilbur went back downstairs to retrieve the developed photos, but found the door still locked and Flo Bishop was not answering even the sternest of knocks. Shea tried picking a lock, but failed and then fell foul of one of the beat cops that were still here in force. She was taken away for extra questioning, while everyone else tried to figure out a way of opening the door. Covering it with a tablecloth to prevent exposure, they were stymied by it being locked and their lockpicker being arrested until they remembered they were not criminals and just asked the hotel manager for the key. Happy to help when the situation was explained, the hotel manager came over, knocked and upon receipt of no answer, opened the door for them. See? Easy!
Unfortunately, things were not cool inside the darkroom. Photos had been developed and were hanging to dry, but they’d never get as dry as Flo Bishop, who was… a desiccated corpse on the floor. They could see that the top of her head was missing, but they could only see this when the lumpy black blob stretched towards the ceiling, away from her lifeless body. Terence whipped out his stolen gun and put a round into the blackness, but to no discernable effect. The rising column of darkness shot forth a lumpy tendril in a crude swipe, but that didn’t make contact. Emil turned around and simply noped out of the building. By the time others investigated, the black blob had gone. Turning on the lights, they examined poor Flo, took the photos she had developed and found more of those fine black granules when the examined the room’s vent grate. As they removed the grate a few of the granules fell in the various trays in the darkroom and those that fell in the acetic acid sizzled and hissed, emitting a vile smelling vapour. Someone asked me what it smelled like and I don’t think I answered, so here it is: Lilac and Gooseberries! jk, it was decaying fish, pungent vinegar and high octane gasoline. They passed off that gunshot as a very large photography flash: this Hotel Manager is having a hell of a day.
They went back and forth for a bit, (it felt like), between the ballroom and the main floor before deciding to talk to the geologists to use their microscope (the nerds wouldn’t just give them a microscope, they’d already checked). Placing one of the fine grains from the darkroom, the Geologist – the accommodating Professor Conrad Blevins – apologized that he wasn’t able to help them on account of this being some sort of simple single cell creature and he wasn’t a Biologist. They looked and could plainly see (at the microscopic level) motion with what looked like fine hairs forming to move the little speck. Leon tested a few theories – that the thing might be susceptible to light (it didn’t seem to be) or that it may be affected by the fairer sex (given its record with them so far today) so they eventually found the female geology student and asked her to lean, womanishly, towards the thing. Still no response.
Blevins WAS able to help them with the canopic jar, however, which was identifiable as a single piece of carved and polished stone, rather than a pottery artifact. So that was rare, and maybe Dr Bronson would have mentioned that if she’d been allowed to finish her lecture. But it was also made of Egyptian granite which as an igneous (I think I said it was metamorphic, but that isn’t correct) rock contains other elements, and the Egyptian granite fields have been high in Uranium and Thorium. Not dangerously high, but not nothing.
They put the grain in a glass jar, having found that the other fine grains were now a smaller number of larger flakes. Terence found that the grain from Celia’s hand was gone from its paper wrapping, a tiny hole visible in the paper and maybe his pocket lining.
All that done, and now convinced that the thing they’d seen was rattling around the hotel’s ventilation system, they resolved to go check out room 808.
