Hawk turned to see that some of the little crowd had drawn closer: not just other fuzhu like Suyan, studded in various piercings and bearing leather bags set on various light harnesses, but spirits as well.

"Everyone in the neighborhood liked Suyan," one of the fuzhu told Hawk, having to crane their head to look up at him.

"Lovely child," a spirit next to them murmured, nodding.

"But she always kept to herself," the fuzhu continued. "So..."

"It's a bit embarrassing to admit it," another fuzhu chimed in, "but I suppose none of us really knew her. I guess what we're getting at is, would you be willing to stay and help us talk to her a while longer?"

Hawk hesitated. A third fuzhu put in, "Yes, I think we'd all like to be able to remember Suyan properly."

"And get to know her before it's too late!" added a robed spirit who had been standing back, but now drew in a little closer.

"Yes, yes..." there was a murmur of agreement.

Hawk sighed. He turned to Vlad.

"What about you?" he asked. "Someone else can pr'y translate if you wanna go. You look kinda tired."

"Oh, I've been awake for thirty-two hours!" Vlad said brightly. His collar was still rumpled, and there was a touch of exhaustion in his face. Even so, he said, "But miss watching you interview a ghost? I'd kill me if Shinobu doesn't!"

Hawk hesitated.

Suyan seemed a little taken aback.

Hawk said hastily.

No! > Her response came more forcefully and fearfully than she'd maybe meant it to, because she then stammered,

She glanced away from Hawk, though her big dark eyes didn't seem to rest any place in particular. she said softly.

Hawk looked up. The sky was still a dry blue, with thin clouds drifting across it.

Someone from behind him spoke up then. "Excuse me..."

A series of faces turned back to Suyan. "Oh, uh..." Hawk fumbled for a moment. The silhouette next to him had lost its clarity and was now a formless body and head. He paused, "Uh," and then tried to clarify,

Someone said something next to him.

Hawk corrected himself.

Suyan stared at him for a long moment with a strange look on her face, a creeping sort of concern. she said, glancing around,

"I don't see anyone, Hawk," Liya echoed, giving him a worried side-eye. Emry rolled his eyes.

"That's 'cuz there's nothing there," he said impatiently, gesturing, and the gesture became an upraised hand, and there was a sudden shriek--

"STOP IT!"

But it all did stop immediately, zipped up somewhere in the lines that etched Hawk's shifting heads, and he recoiled, and so did Suyan.

Hawk said quickly. He seemed to need to search harder for the words now, punctuating each sentence with a pause.

Suyan's voice was starting to shake.

Hawk didn't answer.

Suyan asked. Tears were beginning to fall from her eyes now, though they didn't seem to go anywhere exactly. Hawk tried to break in, but only got out an uncertain 'uh' before Suyan continued, more desperately with each sentence,

Hawk finally said, holding up one taloned finger. The myriad parts of him seemed to curl in on themselves then, and the figure that had been vaguely present at his shoulder gained a somewhat sharper clarity. At the same time, as Suyan waited, more shapes swam into a sort of view: ranged behind Hawk to either side, the impression of heads and shoulders, featureless and fading against the uniform backdrop.

She took a step back, a look of terror coming over her.

"Uh, I mean..." Hawk corrected himself,

Suyan stared, her face etched in awful relief. Then, slowly, she shook her head, and her features began to soften again.

she said, and started to look around.

Hawk said nothing, the expression on his many faces inscrutable, shifting between looking at Suyan and at the vague shape at his shoulder. Suyan started to pace again, lowering her head to search the gutter.

she went on.

Hawk said.

Suyan insisted.

She paused at looked at Hawk, at the mass of moving shapes, which seemed to have withdrawn on itself away from her some. For a beat he hesitated, seeming to struggle with what to say.

he managed.

"She did not see their faces any more than Hawk and Teige could," Luu mused to Vlad. No one around them seemed to notice their conversation, too busy murmuring amongst themselves. "...One of them cut their hand, but a healer could have fixed that by now...but if we could get into the crime scene, perhaps they left blood behind."

Vlad was still trying to clear his ears. "What about the knife?" he asked. "Or that ring?"

"The knife looked like an ordinary straight ceramic blade. But the ring...maybe we--"

Suyan's thin voice drew a hush over Luu and Vlad and everyone else.

Hawk had not said anything since Suyan had finished her recollection; he hadn't even looked around at the crowd, and he didn't now. Instead, he heaved a deep sigh.

"Yeah," he said.

Suyan fell silent, and the recollection ended. She bowed her head.

Hawk sighed. Behind him, the little crowd began to murmur at each other, unsettled by whatever they had just seen or heard.

"That was interesting to watch," Luu remarked at Hawk's shoulder. "You did not even need Vlad for that part."

Vlad massaged his eardrum with the tip of one finger as if to clear it. "I think that was the weirdest thing I've ever experienced," he said, looking puzzled.

Snatches of conversation from some inthe crowd reached them--"Did you hear that?" "Hear it??" Others lowered their voices, comforting each other quietly, more upset than astounded.

Luu, for their part, seemed to get over the shock almost immediately. "Assuming that's really what happened," they muttered, glancing to one side, "what does it give us to go on?"

Suyan said,

There were three of them, hooded and masked, average in build and height, scrambling after her in the dark.

And then, one of them caught up, and grabbed one of her antlers with a gloved hand, and dragged her to the ground. She didn't even have time to fully buck against their hold before a second one was upon her, raising a slim and shining knife over her back.

The knife went in. The hand gripping it--this one, ungloved, with a little ring on the smallest finger--slipped and slid down over the blade, opening a long slice across the palm. There was a muted curse, but no other noise, just the blood running down into the cracks between the paving stones. It shone wetly, red in a way that nothing else was in the dark.

Suyan stared. She said,

She couldn't say how many people, just that there had been more than one, pounding after her in the dark.

Hawk prompted.

The face had been masked and hooded, the hand that stretched out towards her from the darkness nondescript.

Hawk said, gesturing at the running feet, the reaching figure. She looked up at him.

Suyan said, looking around.

As she said that, the facade of the glassworks seemed to suddenly be there, in stark detail: the uneven long windows, the moss in the corners, the glass sign shaped like a gently curled fist hanging above her head. Even the edge of the makeshift tent and cord that blocked off the crime scene came into a sharp focus.

The glassworks wasn't a particularly tall building but it seemed to loom over her anyway, fading upward into a black silhouette against an empty sky. Something about it made her shake.

Hawk said gently. She turned to look at him with huge eyes.

< Y-you can follow back the path... > Hawk trailed off at Suyan's questioning look. She craned her neck to peer into the space inside Hawk's ever-shifting many wings, where a particularly clear silhouette had come into view, but she seemed to disregard it as Hawk tried again. < It is possible they take your keys? >

< Ah, maybe, > Suyan mused, perking up somewhat. < Hmn...I reached my door. > The recollection didn't stop her, though, from going to look at the ground again. < I took out my...keys. >

She had done that--the movement was clearer now, of her head and the lanyard laden with objects in her mouth.

< There was some movement, or maybe it was a light-- > 

Whatever it was had been bright or hot or threatening enough for her to let the lanyard drop from her mouth, and the whole affair fell onto the stones, etched clearly now--the lanyard, attached at one end to a couple of cards, a key-shaped object, and a little charm shaped like a hedgehog. She'd left it there as she turned, bunched up, and sprang away--

< --and I ran. >

Suyan lowered her head and squinted into the moss growing in the cracks between the stones as if trying to bring it into focus. When her nose was within an inch of the moss and it showed in every fine detail, she paused, mute.

Hawk prompted awkwardly. She raised her head a little, staring.

After a very long time, she said, Something about a white flash, a lanyard strung with objects in midair. She continued thoughtfully, The white flash was behind her, illuminating her in silhouette for just a moment. She turned and looked up into Hawk's shifting faces as though only just realizing.

Hawk asked.

Suyan trailed off, as though she had forgotten temporarily. Then she looked around.

She stepped over to the side, where the edge of the sidewalk was just visible, not seeming to notice the featureless shapes of people watching from somewhere just beyond that. Hawk's many faces followed her.

Hawk leaned over to look. There was nothing obvious in the gutter where she was now searching.

Suyan replied, now busy peering at the outlines of the stones.

Hawk asked.

Suyan stared up at the figure with huge eyes. Finally, she said,

"Aw, shit," Hawk muttered, and a flurry of movement went through the many heads as he looked round. "Uh, hey, can anyone--I need help translatin'."

The heads all aligned themselves to point into the shifting space beside him, where the shape of wings shrugged half open and closed. A silhouette came vaguely into sight there, as featureless as if seen through a thick fog. Maybe it spoke, but the words were inaudible, and it didn't elicit any reaction in Suyan, who merely looked.

"Ok, uh," the heads turned back to Suyan, coming somewhat more into focus as they lowered to her level. Skull-like, eyeless sockets, a long muzzle that was somewhere in the vicinity of a beak, serrated along the jaws in the approximation of teeth. He addressed her in clumsy Aetherian. he corrected himself.

she replied pleasantly.

[Double update today! Click back to make sure you saw the first page!]

He gave the impression of being multi-headed and multi-limbed, or else that his head and limbs were moving ceaselessly, leaving behind vague shadows. The stripes on his tailfeathers inked trails as his tail fanned, lifted, switched sides, set down. Parts of him--the edge of a long face, a taloned paw lifted in greeting--swam somewhat closer into focus, but the rest of him was like looking through a fogged glass.

"Hi," he said, in a voice that seemed equally indistinct.

[Double update today! Click forward!]

"What was her name?" Hawk asked no one in particular. The crowd was small: a few people pausing on their way to peer into the alley at the white figure pacing it, a few other fuzhu decked in leather harnesses and piercings clustered together.

"Suyan," one of the fuzhu replied.

"Swan?" Hawk tried to repeat the name. Another fuzhu looked around at him.

"Su-yan," they said, slower for his benefit.

"Okay." Hawk stepped forward out of the little throng. Heads turned towards him, the movement drawing their attention away from the ghost.

The mouth of the alley was cast in a cool shade. She was wandering across the cobblestones underneath a glass sign that was worked into a hand grasping its own suspension cables. A short distance beyond her, the alley was roped off by a cord strung with rectangular signs, and further obscured by a cloth tent that stretched from one side to the other, weighted by bricks along the bottom edge.

"Suyan?" Hawk called.

She had been looking idly down at the ground, but her head snapped up and towards him immediately.

A palpable shudder went through the small crowd--even over Luu and Vlad, who had ostensibly been expecting this. Hawk just raised a hand in a sheepish greeting.

"Hi," he said.

[Teige (still a little hungover) is meeting with a spirit who is tidying a stack of papers.]

Spirit: And with that, the paperwork is done. Welcome to R.I.T.! Next you'll need to report to the University admissions office for enrollment. R.I.T. will check in quarterly on your coursework to make sure you're getting along all right. Please be diligent with your studies!

[Teige nods and gets up from his seat.]

Spirit: By the way, I think it's really great that you are doing this. Almost all the potential recruits we get from Earth want to join the field divisions. So many of them wash out, but even then it's hard to convince them to try volunteering for another division. Some of them even get offended at the idea of doing something other than combat! They all have very strange ideas. It's nice to meet an Earthling who doesn't have to be convinced how important our support work will be!

Teige: [laughing awkwardly] Haha! Sure!

"Well, sure." Vlad shrugged uncomfortably. "A violent death, probably pretty sudden...that'll get you a ghost. But the cops usually dispel any ghosts that start haunting in Escalus. They're usually quick at it, too..."

"It's part of their job to dispel ghosts quickly," Dina snapped. "They're just terrorizing people at this point. And you know if anyone else tries to dispel it, they'll get into trouble."

Vlad made a noise of agreement.

"Wull, can't they, uh...try to get evidence from the ghosts, or somethin'?" Hawk asked awkwardly. Luu looked at him with a raised eyebrow.

"Hah? It isn't as though you could simply interview one, they can't see or hear you." They paused, and then added thoughtfully, "Perhaps watching one might be helpful, in case they do anything that might be a clue..."

"The investigators aren't even doing that!" Dina said angrily, as Hawk hesitated. "Even if they could just talk to the ghost, they wouldn't bother."

Finally Hawk cut in, looking resigned. "Well, I can," he said. "Lemme talk to them."

[Housekeeping: we'll have a couple of one-off break comics for the next two weeks before getting into the next short! Thanks for reading!]