Chapter 154: I'm Feeling Very, Very Sleepy...
Naomi called up one of the few jewelry stores still left standing in town. With a little difficulty & a call to Urasaria, the owner verified they were students and arranged to meet with them in his shop fifteen minutes later. He closed up for the day and was standing at the counter with his loupe when they came inside.
"Go ahead." he said, and Naomi handed him the emerald. "You said this was part of an investigation?"
"We found this on somebody with a Revenant. Would you be able to track it?"
His eyes lowered to it. "…I may be able to, yes. There's… small particularities with manufacturers. There's not many stores around here, anymore - someone's been buying most of them up, but…" He examined it with his loupe. "…twenty carats. Quite a nice find."
"Isn't that pretty pure?" said Natasha.
"No, but good question. Karats is for purity of metals. Carats is for weight of stones." He frowned. "…it's possible this is mine, actually. There was a recent shipment - a small shipment - I received, that had one item missing. You said you found this on, er, someone with a Revenant?"
"A host, yeah. It's from here?" said Naomi.
"Well, it was meant to be, at least. He must've stolen it before… well. Some point before it arrived here. Most emeralds come from mines over in Colombia or Brazil and are cut before they're shipped here. There used to be a student who helped deliver these things, I remember. She wore an eyepatch. She stopped coming a few years ago. She usually had her - I suppose it must've been her protege with her. Or her girlfriend."
"Did you remember her because of the eyepatch?" said Natasha.
"No, I remember her because of her voice. It was very unpleasant. It sounded like birds being burned alive in a shoebox."
"…uh, back to the jewels." chimed Naomi, relevantly. "You said it's been going on for a while, right?"
"Over the past few shipments, yes. I thought it was just an error on their part - but it kept happening enough that, well, I reported it to the police…"
"Who did you buy it from?"
"Magdalene Stones. They're an international corporation - I would be very surprised if it were on their account."
"When were you supposed to receive it?"
"Last Monday."
"…right." muttered Naomi. "We'll keep it for evidence and come back if we have any more questions."
"If I'm still open by then." he muttered, handing the gem back. "I hope you women can find whoever's responsible for this. It's already hard enough running a business like this - none of you young people buy diamonds or anything like that anymore, and I even read recently most of you can't even afford an engagement *and* a wedding ring. Probably why the divorce rate is so high. There's people coming by every day with offers to buy me out. I'm starting to think of throwing the anchor to them."
"Um, we will." nodded Natasha, comprehending less than none of it, and in the next instant -
- a masked woman crashed through the doors in a rain of glass, rolling up to her feet as she landed thirty feet away; Avalanche formed as Naomi shouted for the owner to run through the door behind the counter, and the two & one started to circle with a circular display of jewelry between them. Naomi stomped down and the spike of concrete missed the woman by an inch, but a concrete hand flew out & slammed her face in to the glass with a sickening smash.
Blood covered the jewels, but the maskwoman wasn't easy. She swept her hardening arms through the glass and raised her aim. Shards of glass ejected out and flew towards Naomi, but a swift wind sent them back to sender; her chest turned to rubber and made them ricochet back and Avalanche's arm took a dozen hits. Naomi ripped out a curse as she peeled off the top layer of her stone arm, pressing Natasha back as the maskwoman vaulted up to the broken case and made a rush towards her.
Glass was sticking to the woman's legs, but Naomi knew something was wrong with how she was gonna body-slam her. The woman leaped off the case, but a puff of pebble dust hit her eyes as Naomi curved left & watched her hit the ground shoulder-first. Naomi smashed her back in with a kick that turned her over twice and her boots would've snapped her neck if she didn't keep rolling, and she snapped up against the wall with spines like a glass hedgehog growing.
Naomi stepped up ten feet away and watched her closely, flesh fingers taking the emerald out of her own left arm. She threw it to the side and the woman grunted, rushing at her. Naomi caught a spiked stinger on the cheek and staggered under a hook that would've ripped her face in half, then bashed her foe with a stone left that slammed her against the wall.
A puff of pebble dust blinded the woman and Naomi rushed her, but she was the fool this time. The woman swept around her with ten fingers on Naomi's waist and if she hadn't kicked out in time the suplex would've broken her neck. Naomi hit her with a smack that threw her through another glass case and she turned just in time to see her pull her face out. Her lips filled with rage as she surged towards Naomi.
Naomi got her feet under her in a hurry. She braced against the wall and kicked out with a leg that folded her foe like a jackknife, and when she screamed Naomi brought her knee up and bent her nose crooked. The woman staggered away, blood dripping down her neck. She eyed the other wall and started rushing towards it.
Naomi thought she was going for Natasha, but the maskwoman hit the wall and bounced back like a loaded spring at her; the next thing she felt was the breath escaping her neck as the maskwoman chokeslammed her to the ground and pinned her to the floor, nails digging in to her neck.
Naomi's left was trapped, but her right was free.
A pebble appeared underneath her right and she flicked it so hard that the bitch's kneecap shattered like a plate; she fell off of Naomi and Naomi slammed her in to the floor with a loud thud. Rings of concrete burst out of the ground, wrapping around the woman's arms, but her body was slipping and she bucked Naomi off; her body slipped out. Naomi clutched her head as her foe leaned back against the wall, and Naomi caught a boot to the stomach that threw her against another glass case whose shards sliced a few hairs off her head when it broke.
She made a gesture to Natasha as the woman rushed towards her, and as her stone fingers snapped, a hole peeled open in the floor. The woman couldn't see what was bubbling before a jet of lava burst out and melted her mask to her face, and an Avalanche smack nearly popped one ear out the other as Naomi slammed her to the floor with her flesh arm. The next thing Natasha saw was Naomi's stone fingers wringing the woman's neck until she went limp and she turned back dripping sweat.
"Sweet." said Naomi, wiping her face with a few Flickendecke patches. "Let's get her Revenant removed and bring her back to the cops for interrogation, right?"
"Um, can't we just torture her for information?" Natasha winced. She was starting not to like this sudden desensitization, either.
"I don't torture." said Naomi forcefully.
"Sorry."
"Just … we'll make sure her Revenant gets removed, yeah? No torture."
Some mentors, like Mia initially, saw their proteges as immature teenagers who needed to be taught control & adulthood. Naomi accepted her job as what was essentially a hired killer, but hoped to bring Natasha over to her way of not prolonging pain. This made her as different from Kate & Serena as molasses & vinegar, who killed as the same type of entertainment that had led lions against gladiators centuries ago. Little wonder was it that they often had the biggest boxes of fanmail.
The morgue was fifteen minutes away walking. Naomi hailed a taxi and the driver didn't make any fuss about the unconscious body in the back seat. Once they pulled up to the morgue, she paid extra for the cleaning as they got out.
Olivia opened the morgue's door before they did.
"Did you get someone too?" said Naomi and Olivia's head shook as the two stepped inside. Viktoria was on the other end standing over the coroner's corpse and a second one was laying on the table. Someone had been rooting around hard in the second's chest.
"What happened?" said Natasha.
Viktoria crouched down. Something was written in blood next to the coroner's corpse. "Someone killed him after we dropped the other man off. Olivia thought she forgot something back here."
"I didn't." she muttered, relevantly.
Naomi frowned. "Looks kinda like the host we were fighting. She tried to break my neck, too."
"Hand her over, then." said Viktoria, glancing back. "Give me some time alone with her."
"No." said Naomi. "We're getting her Revenant removed and handing her over to the cops."
"What, so they can shine a bright light on her in a dark room to try to make her talk?" Her head shook as she stood up. "Give her over -"
" - I'm not fucking torturing her - and I'm not letting you torture her, either."
"You have a very high opinion of somebody who was trying to kill you."
"No, I just think that doesn't give me - or you - the right to treat her like she's some fucking slab of meat."
Viktoria sighed. "I'll never understand why someone will kill but not torture. As far as I know, no one has ever come back from being killed. Plenty of people have come back from being tortured. What's a crueler fate?"
"Being forced to investigate with you."
"Ah, there we receive your true reasoning." Viktoria crouched over the corpse. "Regardless, he left a message as he was dying - conveniently. Likely initials. V.S.."
Naomi stepped over, Avalanche carrying her unconscious cargo like a slab of meat. "You sure that's his handwriting?"
Viktoria frowned. "…a good point. Olivia, find something in his handwriting. Check his desk."
"Phew." muttered Olivia, glad she hadn't had to check the corpses' toe tags. She went over and checked his desk, pulling a sheet out and giving it to Viktoria, whose head shook.
"Correct. It's not in his handwriting. Quite a stark difference."
Behind Viktoria, Natasha saw Naomi give Olivia a knowing glance. "Um, there's still the - the second corpse, too."
"Yeah." said Olivia. "They still left his Revenant, though."
"He was looking for something else, then." said Viktoria. "Natasha, do you have the gemstone?"
Olivia noted she took the word "Natasha" in her mouth with the same tone she usually did and felt a little jealous.
"Um, Naomi does." said Natasha.
"Good. We'll call the police - they can keep it in evidence."
Naomi nodded and called the police before Viktoria could. A few minutes later, she heard sirens outside. "Guess that's them."
"As on time as you can expect." shrugged Viktoria, opening the door for a cop & the detective, only the former wincing at the gore as they stepped inside. A cleanup crew came in as Viktoria relayed it to the detective, and he mused a while.
"You mentioned a name he wrote down?" he said.
"It wasn't in his handwriting - it's a trap, presumably."
"Ah." he muttered. "We'll take it from here, then. See if we can't get something out of your… friend, here."
++++++
Mia woke up that night with her head on her frozen desk, yawning as she unfroze her tablet.
"…not again." she muttered, pillow of ice scarabs forming. "…3:28…contracts… mmhm." Her eyes closed. "Jewelry thieves to Tuyuan, and Naomi had…"
Her eyes opened, and she groaned as she checked her tablet.
"…I'm going to fucking kill you."
[A/N: See, I can write action without dashes, it's just... usually better with them.]
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