Sister Margaret gave a curt nod, then left in the direction from which we had come.
"You should count yourself lucky, rookie," James said to me. "If you had tried to dig your way down into the secrets of the orphanage without me, you wouldn't have gotten past the sister at the door. You should count your lucky stars that Edwin partnered me with you on this case. Don't get me wrong, I consider myself lucky as well. It's not every day that I get the chance to make sure that a new Investigator on the scene does things the right way. The way you talked to her, got her to open up even a little, that takes skill, kid. But you could be better. Let's sharpen your edge until you can draw blood."
"Thank you," I said. I wasn't quite sure what else to say. I liked to think that if I had been tasked with getting to the bottom of what happened in this particular case by myself, then I could have figured it out without any help. James was right, though. It certainly had made things easier given his history with the orphanage.
As we entered the door, I opened my abilities screen. I moved the icon for my Find Clues ability to the quick launch section of my view. Before activating my Find Clues ability, I wanted to have a look at the cell with my own eyes.
The walls inside the cell were very similar to the walls outside in the hallway. They were made of the same rough stone, and it was clear that the cells were not built to keep the inhabitants safe. If anyone in the cells really wanted to hurt themselves, all they needed to do was run full pelt into the stone walls. No, this was not a place to keep people safe. This was a place designed to punish.
There was a bedroll against the far wall, with a thin sheet laying on top of it. In the corner diagonally opposite the bedroll, there was a nasty looking bucket which served as a toilet. There was a grate in the center of the room with a circular opening that was roughly big enough to allow the occupant to empty the toilet bucket. From the smell, I doubted that the bucket was washed between uses. Below that grate was some kind of waste or sewer system that carried the waste away. The opening was nowhere near large enough for a child to be able to squeeze through, no matter how small they were. Even the skinniest, luckiest kid wouldn't have been able to fit more than an arm or a leg through that hole.
"What do you think?" I asked
"I think either we've got a rebel sister on our hands who let this kid loose when she shouldn't have, or, something very strange took place in this cell. There is no way that this kid got out of here any other way than through the front door." James said.
With my Concentration Points at full capacity and not much else to go on as far as clues went, I activated my Find Clues ability.
My Concentration Points dropped down to 50%, and a number of different things became outlined in that strange purple haze that revealed items that might be clues.
That bedroll and the sheet were the first things that I noticed highlighted. I walked over to them and gently lifted the sheet from the top of the bedroll. There was nothing out of the ordinary there. I shook out the sheet to dislodge anything that might be relevant to the case. When nothing fell to the stone floor, I folded the sheet and placed it at the foot of the bedroll.
There was a thin straw-filled pillow at the top of the bedroll. It was barely thicker than the bedroll itself, but it would have been better than nothing at all. It would have certainly been better than sleeping with your head against the cold stone floor beneath. The pillow was covered in a cloth pillowcase that was stains of differing age and color. I didn't want to touch the pillowcase, but my Find Clues ability lit it up like a Christmas tree.
I lifted the pillowcase up. It felt moist and grimy in some places, and stiff and hard in others. It had probably never been washed. There was a musty fungus-like smell wafting up from it, and my stomach started doing flips. Someone had slept on this. I took the pillowcase in one hand and grabbed the straw-filled pillow with my other. I gently pulled the pillow out, just to see if anything had been hidden inside. To my surprise, a blue gem tumbled out onto the stones below. I picked it up.
"What is that?" James asked.
"I think our little thief hid something," I said. "Something that he wanted to keep hidden from the Sisters."
"It looks like a sapphire."
"If the kid sold this on the street, how much would he make?" I asked.
"Enough to get free of this place, maybe even enough to travel to another city."
"If the kid was planning on using this sapphire to fuel his escape, why leave it behind? Unless he was taken against his will."
"That sounds logical," James said.
"Is it possible that the Rat King sent someone up here to take the kid?"
"It's possible, but highly doubtful. The Rat King wouldn't go back on his word," James said.
"Are you absolutely sure of that?"
"Yes. I know him. He would not go back on his word."
"All right, then. Who else do we have on our list of suspects?" I asked.
"I think the kid might have just gotten lucky. He could have had the opportunity to escape when the sisters opened his door, and if he was crafty enough, could have slipped out between patrols," James said. "I think we're looking for a runaway, not an abduction."
"You might be right."
I placed the sapphire into one of my coat pockets. I couldn't just leave it behind here in the cells beneath the orphanage. Once we found the kid, I'd give it back to him. If selling that sapphire was all he needed to be able to find a new life, then I wanted to give him that chance.
I lifted the bedroll to see if there was anything else hidden beneath it. My Find Clues ability highlighted the bedroll still as a potential clue, however, I found nothing of note within it.
I turned around and looked at the room from the angle in which John would have seen it laying on the bedroll and found nothing of note.
The grate in the center of the room was also highlighted. I looked at it from above and saw nothing but darkness below the metal opening. If this was some kind of sewerage system, then whatever was poured down the drain would be taken somewhere.
As far as I could see there were only two ways that anything could have left this room once it was locked inside. The first was if the door was unlocked and the occupant was allowed to leave. The second option would be through the grate at the bottom of the room. But it was impossible that anything could fit through it except for the waste from the bucket.
It was when I changed my focus from the darkness beyond the grate to the grate itself that I noticed the blood.
There wasn't a lot of it, but there was enough to know that at some point recently, someone inside this room had been bleeding, and that blood had passed through the grate and into the waste management system below. I took out a pair of tweezers from my investigator's kit and tried to pry away some of the dried blood flakes. A couple of flakes peeled away and fell into the darkness, but I did manage to take one piece gently in the end of my tweezers.
"I found blood," I said. "Dried, from the looks of it."
James turned away from the bucket and focused on what I was holding in the end of the tweezers. He crossed the room and gently took the tweezers out of my hand, being careful to ensure that he kept a grip on the flake of dried blood.
"There's a pair of matches in my breast pocket," James said. "Get it out and light a match for me, would you please?"
I pulled out a box of matches, opened the drawer, and struck the match. It bloomed. I held the flaming match up next to the flake of blood pulled from the drain. It was bright red. There was no mistaking it.
At some point, John had been bleeding.
"We don't know that this is John's blood," James said.
"Who else could it have come from?"
James shrugged. "Not who, but what. I ended up in a cell much like this when I was here, and there were times when I was so hungry that the rats that scurried about in the darkness started to look appetizing."
"Rats? Seriously?" I asked, aghast.
"You'd be surprised
what you would do when the alternative is starving. However, we also can't discount the possibility that there was someone else in this cell before our missing boy was locked here, and this blood may be leftovers from him or her. Things are often not as they seem here in Eldin, and you would do well to remember that. Keep your mind open for all avenues of investigation, not just forensic. The things that go bump in the night don't often leave footprints."
James was right. I wanted the blood to be a definitive clue. I wanted the blood to be John's blood because that would give us a solid lead on the case to go forward with. But it may not have been. It could have easily been a red herring.
There had to be something in this room that would give us some clue as to what happened to John.
I looked around the room for other items that were outlined in purple haze. I rechecked the bedroll, the pillow, the pillowcase, the grate, and James had looked into the waste bucket in the other corner. I didn't want to get too close to that bucket. I could smell it from the other side of the cell already. Nothing else that I could see was outlined in purple.
Surely the game wouldn't have presented us with a dead-end this early on into the quest. However, this was a difficult quest, and my skills were only at novice rank so far. Maybe I'd bitten off more than I could chew.
I opened my abilities screen and looked at the meager selection of abilities I had to use so far. Then I saw what I needed My Deduce ability.
Ability: Deduce
Level: Novice
Cost: % Concentration Points
Activating Deduce will immediately activate your higher brain functions to cross-reference all pieces of evidence in your current case file and look for connections between them. The efficacy of this ability scales with your remaining Concentration Points. A higher percentage of Concentration Points remaining will result in higher quality deductions being made.
Well, hot damn. I immediately deactivated my Find Clues ability, which was using up 50% of my Concentration Points. It slowly started to rise back up towards 100%, but it was going pretty damn slowly. It would be minutes before my Concentration Points reached 100%, so I started doing another circle of the cell to look for other clues that my Find Clues ability might have missed.
Upon approaching the bedroll again, I noticed that there was a small image scratched into the filth that had covered the bricks. It was a crude little stick figure of a boy standing next to a female figure wearing something that looked like a crown. It was rudimentary but clear. The little stick figure boy was holding hands with a princess or something.
"Hey James, what do you make of this?" I asked.
I turned around and saw James closing the door to the cell, and I forgot all about the little picture scratched into the filth when I saw what was hidden behind there.
A symbol. A symbol that looked as though it had been scrawled in blood. A small circle surrounded by six triangles. They were missing their bases, so they looked like greater-than or less-than symbols that were commonly used in math or programming language. Each triangle was arranged around the circle with the point facing inward, so it gave the look of some kind of jagged arcane symbol, or maybe even a snowflake.
Small rivulets of blood had dribbled down from where an excess had been applied. One circle, and six incomplete triangles. Painted in blood and hidden behind the cell door. How was this connected to the disappearance? And where was John Byrne?
Chapter Fifteen
The Catacombs
Before I could open my mouth, a message appeared at the bottom of my view.
Crime scene investigation completed. You have gained 150 experience points!
You have reached Level 2!
A bright light swirled around me, infusing me with power. All right! Level 2! I looked down and summoned forth my experience bar. I hadn't just reached Level 2 - I was almost a third of the way towards Level 3! Not only did investigating these crime scenes give me a wealth of information to use in my case, but they gave me a hefty boost to experience without having to engage in direct combat.
Crematoria Online looked like it would be one of those games that let its players level up in many different ways, which I was very glad for. If I was trapped here until I got that Celestial Offering, it was good to know that I could still get strong enough to defend myself without throwing myself in harm's way.
Another message rolled through my notifications.
You have received 1 Primary Attribute Point to distribute.
Well, that answered a question I hadn't thought about yet. Even though I was given 5 Primary Attribute Points to allocate upon starting the game, I would only get one new point to use each level. That was okay, though. I would just need to make sure I thought carefully about how I was going to distribute them.
I took a moment to open my stats page. The only value that had budged was my HP, which had increased from 100 to 110. Was that it? A straight bonus of +10 HP every level? That was a bit lame.
Only having one point to allocate every level meant that every choice I would make would need to be thought out, and every choice would have consequences.
I didn't like that my Strength, Dexterity and Fortitude primary attributes were still at their base level of 5. Strength directly affected how much damage my sword did. Dexterity affected my dodge and the accuracy of firearms, and Fortitude was tied to increasing my health. Damn it. I really needed to increase all those values, and I had no idea what the level cap was yet.
No matter what choice I made, my character would still be coming up short.
Whatever challenges lay ahead of us, I felt like we were tracking headfirst into danger. I would need a decent health pool. I sunk the point into my Fortitude stat and watched my HP jump from 110 to 112.
I didn't expect it to change at all, but it did. Then I realized what had happened. When I leveled up, my HP hadn't increased by a base +10 value; it had increased by a factor of double my Fortitude score of 5. Now that my Fortitude score was 6, it had increased by +12, not +10.
Investing in Fortitude value increases early on would have huge ramifications for leveling my character up. It compounded with every level, pushing my HP value higher and higher. Investing one point now was like investing five points in a few level's time.
Once I had allocated the point, my stats looked a little better.
Lucas Hutchins
Investigator
Level 2
HP: 112
Strength: 5
Dexterity: 5
Intelligence: 7
Charisma: 6
Perception: 8
Endurance: 6
Resilience: 6
Fortitude: 6
"Well that's not bad at all," I said aloud to myself. I had forgotten all about James in the room there with me.
"What's up, buttercup?" he asked. "You were off in your own little world there while the real investigator was doing all the work."
"Sorry, just plumbing the depths of my knowledge for what that symbol might be, but I'm coming up short. Do you have any idea what this symbol means?" I asked.
James raised a finger to his lips as he considered. "I have never seen that symbol in my life."
"Isn't it a little strange that we found this symbol, yet the sisters didn't? Surely they would have checked behind the door."
"I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't. They're pretty good at not noticing really obvious things right under their noses."
"So, what if what we're looking at here is not a missing child, but a runaway? Is it possible that John may have simply hidden behind the open door and slipped out without any of the sisters noticing?"
"That is entirely possible," James said. "What's your gut feeling?"
"I don't think we're dealing with a runaway. Not after seeing that symbol."
I reached out and went to touch the jagged symbol scrawled on the wall.
"Do you think touching the evidence is a good idea?" James asked.
I stopped. My fingers hovered
an inch from the surface. I compared the width of my own fingers to the lines that made the symbol.
"Look at the width of these lines," I said. "They're the width of a child's finger, and the symbol itself is drawn at child's height. The only source of blood inside this cell would have been John himself, unless he managed to catch a rat. If this is his own blood, then how could he draw it? I doubt that the sisters would have allowed him anything sharp enough."
"A wolf with his paw caught in a trap will chew it off rather than starve," James said.
I shuddered. "What do you mean?"
"Caught between the choice of a slow, agonizing death due to starvation and cutting off your own hand to save your life, what would you choose?"
"I think that I'd bleed out before I had a chance to get very far."
"Possibly, but you might be able to use part of your clothing as a tourniquet to slow the bleeding, or perhaps help is just down the road a ways. Personally, I'll take action over certain death any day of the week."
"That's a little extreme. The boy wasn't facing death."
"Not that we know of," James said ominously.
I looked back to the symbol. It had been scrawled hastily. Desperately. What benefit had the boy received for drawing it with his own blood?
I needed answers. I looked to my Concentration Meter, which faded back into existence as I thought about it. It was back up to 100%, which meant it was time for me to get some answers.
I activated my Deduce ability, and suddenly the cell around me unfocused and faded away as flashes of insight and connection flooded my mind.
The job had come from one of the sisters of the orphanage who refused to identify themselves, which meant that Sister Margaret and the people who ran the orphanage wanted to keep the matter secret. She knew more about what had happened than she had let on. James had been interred here himself when he was a child, so this behavior of locking children in solitary confinement had a long history. That by itself would be enough to bring the Judiciary down on the orphanage.
Rise of the Crimson Order: A Crematoria Online LitRPG Novel Page 12
