Chapter Text
[HELP NEEDED] Retrieval of remains from the Medeian Hollow
snowinjuly
Bear with me, this is going to be grim.
I was in high school when the Medeian Hollow first came into existence. In fact: I was one of the survivors of the prom that was being held at the time, at Jackson High—you probably don’t remember me, I didn’t really allow anyone to take any pictures of me at the time. Most of the girls who’d been selected as prom queen candidate had mysteriously gone missing just hours before the Hollow exploded, but before we could find them…well, you can probably guess at what happened.
Me and a friend of mine who went into Public Security, we always had our suspicions over what had happened to them. A Hollow doesn’t just trigger out of nowhere, something big must’ve happened that involved them. But we’ve never really been able to prove it. This week, my friend found out that because of the whole shitshow that was the Bringer scandal, a good chunk of the cases he was on would be getting thrown out. So he and I decided to take matters into our own hands.
I guess what I’m asking for is if it’s possible to retrieve any remains at all of these girls I knew once, in order to determine what really happened at prom all those years ago. I’ll pay whatever price you ask, and you can grab whatever you want if it’s not the remains—we just need the bodies to know the truth. That’s all.
COMMENTS
xX_HeartbreakerSupreme_Xx
wow creeper
daylightproxy007
DM me for my rates!
AstraYaoFan8361
god this is so sad and tragic……hope you guys can retrieve those bodies soon!
bangbooluvr
Who would be nutso enough to take on this commission? Everybody knows once somebody dies in the Hollow there’s no way you can retrieve the body again! You might as well just throw in the towel and call it a day.
Jackdaw
I’ll take the commission.
bangbooluvr
@Jackdaw holy fuck it’s you again. Quick question: ARE you Phaethon back from the “dead”?
actualphaethon
no that’s me!
Jackdaw
B) @snowinjuly I’ll shoot you a DM soon.
--
“So,” says Miyabi, looking up at the forbidding, crystal-encrusted exterior of what used to be an ordinary high school in the middle of town, “body retrieval? This seems a strange request to make.”
Nicole can’t help but agree with the fox, this once. “Everybody knows once somebody’s killed in the Hollow and the window’s long closed, getting the body back is pretty much a no-go,” she says. “Proxy, you’re sure?”
“I met with the client and she’s on the up and up,” Belle explains, her voice coming out of her Bangboo. “She was willing to compromise with pictures of the bodies, or even any kind of evidence we could bring back she and her PubSec contact could examine. She has her suspicions that the deaths of her fellow prom queen candidates are linked to the Medeian Hollow’s expansion.” She waddles up to a broken window, and adds, “Here, this way. Keep an eye out, there are dangerous Ethereals lurking around this area.”
There’s always dangerous Ethereals lurking in the Hollows, but the warning’s appreciated. Nicole hops through the window, followed by Miyabi, and pokes her head back through. “Hey, Anby, Officer, Caesar, you guys coming?” she calls.
“You two go first, I’ll take up the rear and watch over Phaethon,” Zhu Yuan says. “Just because the Medeian Hollow’s been shrinking recently, it doesn’t mean we can relax.”
“Everyone watch your backs,” Anby advises, a hand resting on the hilt of her sword as she vaults over the window, quickly and easily. “In movies featuring abandoned and haunted places with great tragedies in their backstories, there is always someone stalking after the heroes.”
“Nah, they’d have to get past me first!” Caesar says with a chuckle, following after Anby. “And I’ll kick their asses out the window!”
“We’re already going to be dealing with Ethereals, let’s not add a slasher villain to the mix,” says Nicole with a huff. Still, Anby’s got a keen mind and a sharp eye, so she glances around the place, looking for anything out of the ordinary, anything even vaguely suspicious. What she finds slowly peeling off the wall is an old, faded poster featuring a young blonde woman, posing regally with a scepter in her hand.
Sara Berry for Prom Queen! it declares in letters that once must’ve been bright and bold.
“Hey, Proxy, Officer,” Nicole says as Zhu Yuan comes through, Eous riding on her shoulder, “did your client mention a Sara Berry?”
“That’s one of the victims of this Hollow’s expansion,” says Zhu Yuan.
“And one of the prom queen candidates the client mentioned,” says Belle. She claps her hands together, the smack of the Bangboo’s stubby paws surprisingly loud enough to get the attention of the whole group. “All right, we’re looking for seven teenaged girls, who were all 16-18 years old when the Hollow hit: Sara Berry, Anne Healey, Eunice Roberts, Raquel Martinez, Marianna Williams, Patricia McGill, and Quiara Navedo. Ideally we’re hoping to find their remains and bring them home for examination and burial, but anything of theirs, as well as any evidence as to their fates, is enough for the client.”
“How will we know whose body is whose?” Nicole asks. “It’s been years, after all, they’re probably skeletons by now.”
“I’ve had Eous download their dental records,” says Zhu Yuan, “and I’ve brought a portable DNA testing kit, effective even for corrupted remains.”
“Also, I’ll scan them,” says Belle, getting down from Zhu Yuan’s shoulder. “We know from witness testimony where each of the girls was last seen, so we’ll start with the first one on the route—at the end of this hall is a fissure leading to the café area. Patricia McGill was noted to last be seen looking for where they were making the punch.”
“She was going to spike it,” Anby says.
“...yes, that’s the going theory,” says Zhu Yuan. “Did you somehow access the reports before this or…?”
“That’s usually what bored teenagers do in coming of age movies that prominently feature prom and other milestone celebrations,” says Anby. “They spike the punch with alcohol so they can all get drunk.”
Nicole makes a face, and says, “I didn’t realize those movies were that accurate to the teenage life.”
“Not really, Wise and I never did that,” says Belle.
“Neither did I!” Zhu Yuan says, affronted.
“I skipped classes to train harder,” says Miyabi.
“Never went to school,” Caesar cheerfully says.
“You three are such nerds,” Nicole says, unable to quite keep the fondness out of her voice as she pats Eous. “Oh, jeez, imagine being drunk at prom and then a Hollow happens out of nowhere. I’d have thought I was way too drunk to stand before the Ethereal got me.”
“Or you could unlock an entirely new fighting style based on your unpredictable movements while drunk,” says Anby. “That’s happened before.”
“...Drunken Master is not an accurate depiction of a drunk person, Anby,” says Belle, patting her ankle. Then she sets off, leading them carefully down a path before she stops, opens a door, and says, “Are those Gear Coins…?”
“Let me at them!” Nicole says, picking up Eous (“careful!”) and opening the door to see a chest full of the shiny golden coins that open special doors in the Hollows. “Ooh, this might not be real money, but they’ll open doors just fine!”
Caesar stops her before she can burst inside, and says, “Let me handle this, yeah? If anything jumps out at me, I can take it.”
Nicole squints at her, then shrugs. “Sure, okay,” she says, and steps aside to watch Caesar carefully make her way in—oh, no, she just charged right in with a battle cry and whacked the chest open with her shield, that works too. Nicole watches her kick the now-wrecked lid off, and sighs with great exasperation.
The Proxy squeezes in past Nicole, taps Caesar’s knee, and says, “Looks clear in this room. Actually, hang on—Caesar, come and give me a hand, there’s a trophy on that desk that could be relevant.”
Caesar lifts Eous’s tiny, adorable body easily, and Belle plucks a trophy off the shelf and turns it over in her hands. “What’d you find there, Proxy?” Caesar asks.
“Looks kinda like a little plastic trophy to me,” says Nicole. “The kind you give out at kids’ tournaments, you know, the ones spray-painted gold?” She can’t help but let a little bitterness creep into her voice, remembering the first time she got one of those stupid statues, way back when she was young. She’d known just looking at it there was no way she could sell it for the cash she needed for food.
“It is, but look,” says Belle, and Caesar sets her down so she can waddle over to hand Nicole the trophy. “The name on the trophy: that’s Sara Berry. They awarded this to her for being Most Valuable Performer on the cheerleading squad. And there’s something on the bottom…”
“Give it over, let me swab it,” says Zhu Yuan, and Nicole quickly hands the trophy over, because she damn well knows what’s on the bottom. That’s a bloodstain. She motions Caesar out, then takes another peek at the room: must’ve been an office, once. PE teacher’s office, maybe, or whoever was supervising the cheerleading squad. The uneasy thought flickers in the back of her mind:
Did someone die in this room?
More than likely. But whoever they were…she doesn’t think they died during the Hollow’s expansion.
Sure enough: “No sign of corruption on the sample,” says Zhu Yuan, her eyebrows drawing closer together. “It’s organic material, certainly—I’d even go so far as to call it human. I can’t say for certain, but I think someone must’ve used this to beat someone else’s head in. There’s bone fragments still clinging.”
Miyabi says, “This wasn’t from the Hollow’s expansion.”
“Yeah, if it was, it’d be way more corrupted,” says Nicole.
Anby’s hand drifts to the hilt of her sword, and she glances uneasily down the hall, to where the poster once hung. “We should stay together,” she says, urgently. “In movies, when the party splits up, they make it much easier for the killer to pick them off one by one.”
“Splitting up’s not currently in the plan, so don’t worry right now,” says Belle. “I’ll let you guys know when it’s needed, but it’s the absolute last resort. This place gives me the creeps, too.”
“Oh, jeez, if it’s giving you the creeps,” says Nicole, worried now. She likes to think she knows the siblings pretty well, after years of working alongside them. Belle’s a big horror movie fan, and on the job she’s damn near unshakable. If even she’s creeped out, something about the place is deeply, deeply wrong.
“We’ll pull out of here if we need to,” Belle assures her, which…that actually does make her feel better, honestly.
“So like,” says Caesar, her tone somber. “If someone got bludgeoned to death…do you think there’s a body around here that we can retrieve?”
“In this office?” Belle goes quiet for a moment, doing that thing where she’s communicating with her AI buddy and her brother, before she says, “If you open the closet door, you might find something. Fairy’s not sure what, just that the Ether readings…aren’t normal. They’re not spiking or anything, but they’re not registering as active either.”
“Delightful,” says Nicole, dryly, and slides in behind Caesar as the Overlord gingerly, carefully opens the closet door.
They both step back, too well-trained in the ways of Hollows and Ether corruption to gasp out of shock. There is, in fact, a body: long dead, long desiccated, but still wearing a nice lavender prom dress. What might’ve once been red hair still clings to strips of flesh left on the skull, and there—
Zhu Yuan says, quietly, “Blunt force trauma to the head.”
“Oh, fuck,” breathes Nicole, as Miyabi steps forward. “Hey, what are you doing?”
“Inspecting it,” Miyabi says, kneeling down and pulling on a pair of gloves. The corpse is covered in Ether crystals, jutting out of the body’s joints, twisting around what Nicole can see of the ribcage under the torn dress. “Zhu Yuan is correct, the wound on her head is consistent with severe blunt force trauma. It was done with tremendous passion, but no real skill—it took several blows to down her and several more to end her life.”
What do you expect from a plastic trophy, Nicole doesn’t say, because good fucking god. “It’s corrupted now,” she says, suddenly, “but it wasn’t corrupted before. That means…”
“That means an Ethereal put the body in here,” Zhu Yuan completes.
“An Ethereal who was gloating,” says Anby.
“Ethereals can’t actually gloat,” Zhu Yuan says, but Anby shakes her head.
“They can’t gloat,” she says, “but they remember, to some degree. It was in Ghost of the Hollow.”
Well, that’s still another movie, but Anby’s got a good point. “So who is this body, anyway?” Nicole asks. “Proxy?”
“Give me a sec,” says Belle, waddling closer to peer at the body, the open mouth trapped in an eternal silent scream. She goes still for a moment, then jolts out of it and says, “It’s Anne Healey. The dental records match.”
“Shit,” Caesar breathes.
“They weren’t killed by the Hollow outbreak,” says Anby. “The Proxy’s client is right.”
“The question is,” says Nicole now, rubbing at her chin with the back of her index finger, “whodunit?”
--
They don’t take the body with them. It’s too corrupted to safely bring out of the Hollow, so instead Zhu Yuan bags up the trophy and the ID found after some scrambling around the office. “What an unprofessional murderer we’ve got here,” Nicole mutters, which is a little dark, but not so dark as what Zhu Yuan’s heard out of her fellow PubSec officers in the past.
Their goal’s still the cafeteria area, so they trudge out of the office with a more somber atmosphere than before. They stick closer together as well, because Anby’s not wrong, despite the fact that she got her conclusions off her beloved movies—something’s watching them.
Zhu Yuan hears it, first—a high-pitched whisper, distorted by corrupted vocal chords. “Weapons at the ready,” she says, and Anby’s already pulling out her sword. “There’s Ethereals.”
“An Ethereal,” says Anby. “It’s only the one. I think it’s not pleased we disturbed its trophy.”
“Its what now,” says Nicole.
Caesar opens the locker, picks up Eous. “Proxy, you don't mind, do you?” she asks.
“Well, I have to say,” says Belle, surprisingly sanguine, “I didn’t expect to be stuffed in a locker after graduating from school, but. Sure, go ahead. I can get myself out.”
“Great!” Caesar says, and proceeds to very gently place Eous inside the locker in the sweetest, tenderest act of locker-stuffing Zhu Yuan has ever seen. “Okay, stay there. We’ll handle this!” And she shuts the locker door, deploys her shield, and calls, “Where is it?!”
Miyabi unsheathes her blade, and says, “Zhu Yuan, to your left!”
The warning comes just in time. Zhu Yuan twists out of the way as an Ethereal swings a bladed arm down towards her, and fires at it twice to try and knock it back. She can’t quite get a good look at it, it zips by so fast, but she swears that’s a crown on its head, that’s a scepter glinting with Ether crystals fused to its hand. “Get out of the way!” Zhu Yuan calls, and fires a shot at it.
The Ethereal, in response, twists out of the way, graceful as a gymnast, and backflips, skidding back on its knees before it cocks its head at them.
In such tight confines, it’s not easy to fight this Ethereal. Nicole’s briefcase cannon fires out bullets, but she’s obviously attempting to find an angle that won’t catch the others by mistake. Miyabi’s on the defensive, her wide-ranging attacks impractical in such a narrow corridor. Anby and Caesar, however, go full throttle, their swords glinting in the eerie glow of the corrupted scepter as they attack.
The Ethereal swings its bladed arm once more with an ululating shriek, but Caesar pushes Anby behind her and parries off the blow with her shield. “Harder!” she calls, singsong, as Anby all but dances around her and swings her electrified sword up, striking home.
The scepter’s glow grows stronger. Shit. “Caesar, Anby, you need to get out of its way, I think it’s prepping something big!” Zhu Yuan calls, frantic.
Caesar grabs for Anby, drags her back behind her as she holds the shield up. The scepter glows brightly, so bright that Zhu Yuan has to shield her eyes, before the Ethereal brings it crashing down—
—Belle’s voice calls, “Everyone close your eyes!”—
—and Zhu Yuan shuts her eyes just in time, because even through her eyelids, she can see a bright and searing light, like that of a flashbang grenade going off. The force of it pushes her back as well, and she only opens her eyes a few seconds later to see that the Ethereal has disappeared.
Nicole rubs at her eyes, and says, “Can’t believe that thing’s such a coward. I bet it didn’t like how many more of us there were.”
Belle, who’s already pushed the locker door open, waddles up to Miyabi, who’s sheathed her sword for the moment. “Maybe it thinks it’s less capable than it is,” she muses to Miyabi. “Something about its movements strikes me as—well, not familiar, but. Hm. Caesar, you remember when Pompey mutated?”
“Yeah,” says Caesar with a sigh. “Poor old man. Still, gave us a hard fight, he fought and rode just as hard as he did before he—” Her voice halts as something seems to click in her head, and she says, “Proxy, you’re not saying…”
“Mm,” says Miyabi. “As the tree remembers the apple it grew from, in some dim way, the Ethereal has a memory of the person. Is that so?”
“Like Ghost of the Hollow,” Anby says.
“Well, that wouldn’t be as accurate,” says Belle. “I think it’d be more on point to say that the Ethereal has…an impression of its old muscle memory. Pompey was still an expert at fighting on a motorbike, and if the rumors are right and those two at the Ballet Twins really are who I think they are, their movements make sense—they’re dancing a ballet for two. This Ethereal, did anybody notice it was moving kinda…acrobatically, but erratically?”
Zhu Yuan nods, and says, “I did. Sort of like it didn’t realize it was dealing with professionals, like it’s used to dealing with much weaker opponents, but there was—it could twist and turn on a dime.”
“So, okay, was our Ethereal once a cheerleader?” Nicole says.
“It could be,” says Belle. “Also, uh, guys, I found some things in the locker you might want to see.”
--
“Oh my god why are there bones in this locker,” Nicole yelps as Belle very carefully, very gingerly puts the handkerchief chock-full of, yep, human bones on the ground. They’re small, Caesar thinks, but they’re not, like—so tiny it’s even more horrifyingly tragic to contemplate.
“I had Fairy analyze these bones,” says Belle. “They’re, um. Well.” She coughs. “Assembled, they’re a human foot. If you look here,” and she points a paw at a bone that’s got a couple of Ether crystals growing out the end of it, “you can see it’s been sheared off. Not very neatly. Identification is…not going to be easy.”
Anby, softly and with a grave look on her face, says, “Someone cut this person up—and not very well, at that. That cut…you’re right, it doesn’t look clean. There’s a bit here…”
“Yeah, looks like someone just snapped it off out of impatience,” says Zhu Yuan.
“Is it like the body in the storage closet?” Caesar asks.
Belle nods. In Eous, it’s practically a full-body bob up and down. “Whoever did it, they did it before the Hollow outbreak occurred,” she says. “Ether corruption likes any type of organic material, but it prefers living material more than dead. If whoever this was had died in the outbreak itself, there’d be more corruption than there is.”
“Great, so, somebody was going around killing people at prom like a horror movie villain, fantastic,” Nicole grumbles. “Do we have any idea who it is?”
Belle shakes her head.
Caesar pushes the locker door open a bit more with the tip of her sword, and says, “Huh, doesn’t look like much to me, when you get the bones out. But aw, look how cute the pictures are!” And they are cute, she’ll stand by that: they’re a collection of adorable photos of students just posing for the camera, mugging and voguing and throwing up peace signs. There’s one particular photo that catches her eye, one of the assembled cheer squad, resplendent in green and white.
She tugs it out of the locker, turns it over, and says, “Hey, there’s a note on the back of this one—Bears Forever.”
“Let me see,” Zhu Yuan says, and plucks it from her hand. “Proxy, do you recognize any of these people?”
Belle waddles closer, peers at the photo, and says, “Three of the missing girls are on the cheer squad. We’ve already found Anne Healey. Eunice Roberts is fairly prominent in this photo, she’s out in front row. Sara Berry’s the centerpiece, she used to be cheer captain.” She looks at the locker, and says, “This was the client’s locker—look, those are her initials.”
“JJ loves MG,” Miyabi reads. Her eyes flick to the rest of the pictures, and she says, “Your client seems as though she was well-liked by her classmates.”
“She was,” says Belle.
“So why was a foot that almost certainly belonged to one of her classmates in her locker on prom night?” Miyabi asks.
Belle sighs. “A sign of mockery, I’m guessing,” she says, crossing her arms, looking as troubled as a Bangboo can possibly get. “She’s only got the one leg. She mentioned that she used to get some snide remarks about it, but she never said who.”
Anby says, “It’s the cheer captain. In movies, the queen bee of the school regularly targets those who are visibly different from the crowd in order to enforce the status quo and establish their place in the high school hierarchy.” She peers at the pictures herself, and says, “That it did not work suggests that the cheer captain’s authority wasn’t respected, and queen bees tend to go to extreme lengths to ensure their authority remains intact.”
“Anby,” says Nicole, with a sigh, “that’s from High School Horrors 3.”
“Well, it’s as good a theory as any,” Belle says. “But given we don’t know a whole lot about these guys, that’s really all it is.” She taps Zhu Yuan’s shin, and says, “Can you identify whose foot this is?”
“I can try,” says Zhu Yuan, and kneels down, handling the fragile bones with care.
Caesar steps away from the morbid scene, with Miyabi in her wake, and says, “Do you think the killer’s still on the loose?”
Miyabi shakes her head. “Not out in New Eridu,” she says. “But the Medeian Hollow has always carried the reputation of being dangerous to a specific demographic.” Her hand rests on the hilt of her sword. “Most of the Ethereals here behave like any other. They don’t discriminate on who their prey is, so long as it’s in the vicinity. But the one we just encountered…it has a special hatred for young women.”
Caesar frowns. “That’s weirdly specific,” she says. “Why young women?”
“No one has been able to figure out why,” says Miyabi. “But in light of the information we’ve found, I have a theory, and a disquieting one.” Her fingers tighten around the hilt of her sword, before she shuts her eyes, takes a breath, and visibly forces herself to relax. “Perhaps…it is no coincidence that these two women died on prom night. Perhaps—someone wished to make certain their path to the throne was unencumbered by any competing claims.”
It is unsettling, and deeply so, because, well, Caesar’s the acting Overlord. She knows damned well how thorny that path can get—Lucius’s ambition nearly poisoned Cinder Lake, and certainly led Pompey to his death. “So that list of missing women isn’t just a list of victims,” she says. “It’s a list of suspects now, too.”
“Anby is not wrong to suspect the cheer captain,” says Miyabi. “The cheerleading trophy…”
“It’s a blunt weapon, whoever did it probably just grabbed for the closest thing and then, whack.” Caesar mimes bringing an imaginary trophy down onto somebody’s head. “Good night, sweet princess.”
“Or it’s a twisted irony,” says Miyabi. “There is an upsetting poetry to be found in such an act.”
“It could be their cheer teacher,” says Caesar. “Or. Uh. Is there a cheer teacher? ‘Cause I never figured that part out and Lucy always rolls her eyes when I ask her what high school was like in New Eridu.” She scratches the back of her head, and says, “Apparently she went to a boarding school so it was, like, way out of the usual experience.”
“I would not know either,” says Miyabi. “I spent my adolescence training to become the best swordsmaster in New Eridu. I skipped many classes.”
“Huh, that scans,” says Caesar. “I spent years training to be the Overlord and learning to lead the gang.” She sighs, then glances back at the Proxy and co., and says, “But, I’unno. People say we’re ruthless out in the Outer Ring, but really we just don’t take any shit. Someone chopping people up like meat…” It makes her stomach churn.
Miyabi nods. “The tiger believes it is the king of its land, until it comes to a different land and sees savagery it could never dream of,” she says.
“I sorta get what you mean,” says Caesar. “Like. You say it weird but I get it. It’s just…” She runs a hand through her hair, curses when some of it gets in the gears of her prosthetic and tugs it out. “It’s just, y’know, nothing in the movies ever brings this up.”
Anby, right behind the both of them, says, “There are plenty of movies depicting horrific massacres during prom night. The most famous one I can think of is Carrie, though I don’t think our killer is the victim in her situation that Carrie was.”
“Holy shit—” Caesar yelps, startled, because shit, Anby just does that, apparently. How does she do that? She’s never been able to ask. Ought to get Nicole to put a bell on this girl, god.
Miyabi doesn’t even flinch, which is impressive, before Caesar remembers she probably heard Anby coming with those giant fox ears of hers. She tilts her head to the side instead, and says, “The Proxies showed us that movie. I considered it training for unexpected threats, at first, but as it went on I realized that the threat Carrie presented wasn’t entirely unexpected—but it could have been averted. Perhaps this, too.”
“Perhaps,” says Anby, sounding doubtful. “But Carrie’s resentment built up until it exploded. This person…if the killer is who I think it is, I can’t think of a satisfactory explanation as to her motives beyond greed gone out of control.”
“Who do you think it is?” Caesar asks.
“We’ve managed to figure out who the foot belongs to,” says Anby. “Eunice Roberts. With Anne Healey clearly dead and the foot in the Proxy’s client’s locket as a vicious mockery, I’ve narrowed it down to the one other figure on both the missing persons list and the photo in the locker.” She tugs the prom queen poster from her bag, and passes it over to Caesar.
Vote for Sara Berry.