[PLOT] [Investigation] [Candidates] Don't Forget Us!

[Fel]

With everything that's been happening, I think the entire Weyr has just sort of... forgotten we're here. Well we'll show them by solving this before anyone else! After all, we do kitchen chores all the time and nobody is going to think it's weird if we search in between dishwashing!

[nineofswords]

Candidate Nayru

Poisonings in the Weyr. Intrigue, danger, a chance to make a name for herself, to prove that she was more than some mere candidate, more than just a Harper. She was the stuff legends were made of. If she saved the whole Weyr, surely a gold dragon would choose her...or perhaps even a humble green, which would also be just as good. This was High Reaches, after all, where all colors were equal, and to save the Weyr while riding a simple green would be a reward as great as a gold. Perhaps greater, as it would be proof of her humility and grace.

She began looking through cupboards, looking for strange vials or containers, anything unlabeled or which looked or smelled strange. She wasn't having a great deal of luck, though. There were several learning songs about how to recognize and avoid poisonous plants, but as she ran through them in her head, even they were failing her. "I refuse to believe a poisoner could outwit the entire Weyr like this!" she said, stamping her foot in frustration as yet another cupboard bore no poisoned fruit.

---

Candidate Miguel

Miguel's searching methods were...unorthodox. He seemed more interested n providing moral support than actually looking. He was strumming on his instrument and improvising songs. "We've got to find the hiding place,
the hiding place
the hiding place
the hiding place
we've got to find the hiding place,
of where the poi-son'd go!"
He gave a musical flurish to finish off, then started strumming something fast-paced and encouraging.

No longer singing, he said, [b]"Anyone check over the cupboards yet? That seems like a place not a lot of people would inspect! Oh, and look for anything that says 'poison' on it, or with a skull and crossbones,"[/b[ he added helpfully.

[Fel]

Chaneil fought to keep from rolling his eyes. He didn't see why it was remotely important for them to look for evidence of something that everyone knew was happening. It was someone else's problem, not his. All he had to do was the dishwashing that he'd been assigned.

Which was boring. But better than sticking his nose in somewhere it didn't belong.

"No," he told Miguel with a shrug. His favorite word, that. No. Because why would he have looked in the cupboards. "We'll probably get in trouble if anyone notices we aren't doing chores. And I don't want to do extra chores. Plus what if it's one of the cooks? They'll poison us next if it is, for poking around" And why did the other Candidate seem so excited about looking around, anyway. It was a kitchen, it wasn't particularly interesting.

Of course, Chaneil had followed the others and wandered away from the basin where the dishes sat. Why do dishes when he could just... not?

[Windra]

Candidate Mukadi

Clutching her family heirloom, Mukadi hazarded a glimpse behind the counter. There was no space between the wood and the rock wall, so shoving something in there would be nigh impossible. How about underneath?

When she dropped to all fours, the others began chattering about looking through cabinets. Mukadi scoffed without glimpsing their way as she scooted along, cheek to the ground. "Sure. Yeah. The cabinets. Nobody in their right mind would poison an entire community and leave the evidence sitting right out in the open unless they were planning on incriminating somebody else.."

For that note ... had anybody checked Jae's weyr? That would be something. Maybe somebody would want to pin the crime on somebody in a position of power. And how did they know it wasn't the Weyrleader behind it, anyway? Or what about Raev?

For every dimple in the molding under the cabinets, Mukadi reached in to feel with her fingers. "Look for false walls. Anything that looks like it might have been cut out and placed back. Knock on things to see if they're hollow."

[Arcane]

Pyeta had never fancied himself a hero. Or a detective. He was a holder, a brother, now a candidate. But if the rest of his class wanted to try to search for clues, he would do his part, of course. It was always important to be helpful and he supposed it spoke well of them that they did not wish to leave all the work to their elders.

"The walls are stone. Can you build a false wall in stone?" Pyeta asked. He did not come from a world of spycraft and secret doors. In his home, a wall had always been just a wall. All doors and windows honest and clear and upright.

Feeling a bit silly, he looked down at the ground instead, searching for trapdoors, the sort that might led to a wind cellar. Which seemed at least mildly more sensible than a hidden room.

"I doubt it's one of the cooks. I'm sure the weyr interviews them all thoroughly and they're grateful to be given the prestigious task of feeding dragonriders," Pyeta tried to reassure his fellow candidates, "What motive would they have to turn to evil? We should strive not to be paranoid. It is not healthy to jump at shadows."

[FirebrandPhlox]

Sheridan was carefully inspecting jars of spices for anything that appeared suspicious. She wasn't a cook, nor was she terribly familiar with what different seasonings even looked like before they were cooked into food. But if there was a chance she could help find the poison, especially if she could do it before Nayru, she was absolutely going to search high and low until she found something that would help.

"Wouldn't you want to incriminate someone else? I don't think we'll find a clearly labeled bottle of poison or anything, but we might manage to find something that's already been tampered with." She opened a jar of brown powder and sniffed it. It was warm and spiced, didn't seem like poison. "If it is a cook, they're probably doing it on the fly, but if it's someone else, they need to get the poison in well before mealtimes."

[Fel]

The kitchen staff appears to be ignoring the Candidates shirking their chores and poking around, though they are in full view of several cooks.

One cook, a woman named Larcuh, suddenly collapses in the middle of kneading bread.

[Windra]

Mukadi's head popped off when something hard hit the ground. A nice, shlooping thump. Followed by gasps, panicked shrieks. Oh ... there were cooks. Double oh, one had fallen seemingly without warning.

"Ah." Shit. Scurrying off her knees, Mukadi did take several bounds in the lady's direction. There was still flour on her hands. What had she been doing? There was dough ... Ah, kneading bread? She reached for her but jerked back, disdainfully glancing at the white powder on the woman's digits. "Piper!"

The garnet fire-lizard appeared without much fanfare. Or had she already been there? She was such a stalwart, quiet little creature ...

"Go and gather a healer!" Mukadi clapped her hands and the creature was gone. She briefly pursed her lips at the counter and back again. "Don't touch the dough! Or her hands!" Or anything really. She unraveled the scarf from around her own neck, bundling it awkwardly around her own palms. Mukadi worked to roll the lady onto her side. It wouldn't help for her to start vomiting while laying on her back. "Where do they store the flour? One of you go look, huh?"

[FirebrandPhlox]

Sheridan pursed her lips. She didn't like being told what to do by her peers, especially ones that were as generally unserious as Mukadi was, but this was an emergency, and no time to argue.

"Be careful! She could have hit her head and moving her will make it worse!" Well, there was time enough to argue a little bit.

Now that she had gotten that bit of talking back out, she began hurriedly sifting through cabinets and storage areas, searching for the flour.

[Arcane]

Pyeta's heart stopped, at the sudden collapse, of a woman right in front of him. Despite all he knew of the poisonings, their silly investigation suddenly feeling deadly serious.

There was poison in the room.

Someone was already...hurt? Sick? Dying?

Pyeta didn't know the word.

Doing his best to cover his hands with his tunic, he tried to pull the woman and Mukadi both as far away from the area she'd collapsed as he could, away from whatever had caused her sudden collapse.

"Maybe we should leave the room, all of us," Pyeta suggested, a bit shakily, "There's something in here. What if someone else catches it? Or worse?"

The room looked like an ordinary kitchen, still. The entire weyr was suddenly a deathtrap. His poor brothers. They must be so afraid,

"If there's anything here to find- I'm sure they healers will recognize it better than we could anyway. The best thing we can do is avoid disturbing the evidence," Pyeta said. He was pretty sure he'd heard that once- somewhere- from a guard friend- after a minor theft. But really- he just wanted everyone to get away, before someone else collapsed of whatever foul miasma lingered in the weyr.

[Fel]

TW: Death

Larcuh's back arches, and her breath comes in in foaming spurts. And then it doesn't come at all.

The flour seems to be stored in a pantry, alongside other supplies in recent use. The Weyr seems to serve a variety of meals throughout the day to suit many different watch schedules.

[FirebrandPhlox]

TW: Death description

Sheridan opened the pantry that contained the flour, it was stacked near other items that were recently used by the cooks. As much as she wanted to dive in and find the poison, she had enough restraint to keep herself from touching the potentially tainted ingredient.

"I found the flour, it's over here!" She called, turning her head to glace back at the other candidates.

She saw it. All of it. The cook's spasm and choking final breaths gasped through foam. Sheridan's eyes went wide as her knees buckled beneath her. She gripped the door of the pantry to keep herself upright.

"Oh shit." She said in a low voice, eyes focused entirely on the corpse. "Shit." She repeated, shaking her head slightly.

There were rumors that people had died from the poison, but Sheridan had thought that was the usual exaggerated rumors for scare value. She hadn't considered that the poison was actually capable of killing someone. Most of the stories she had heard, people got better within a day or two, but this? There was no coming back from this. The cook was still as a rock, completely unmoving. She was dead.

[nineofswords]

Miguel - Chaneil
CW: Death description, denial

At Chaneil's refusal to participate, Miguel got to his feet and strummed as he approached his fellow candidate. "Oh come on, where's your spirit of adventure, your sense of fun? Don't you want to be the one to find the poison? They'll write ballads about you! Here, I'll start." He played a few heroic sounding chords, then began to sing: [b]"There once was a man name Chaneil~
The whole Weyr he made it his mission to heal!~"

It'd need work, clearly, but there was promise there, he thought!

And then a woman collapsed. Miguel stopped playing abruptly. He set the guitar down and ran over with Mukadi to the woman. He had no such issues with touching the downed cook, though. He shook her a bit, trying to get her to respond. "Ma'am, are you okay? Ma'am?" When her back arched, he at first thought that was a good sign, but then she foamed at the mouth...and was gone.

"Oh shit..." he said quietly. "She...she was okay just a second ago..." Abruptly, he started pounding on her chest the way he'd seen healers do. He wasn't quite sure what it was meant to do, except hopefully help keep the woman alive. "Don't die. C'mon, you're gonna be fine, miss, come back..."

---

Nayru - Pyeta, Mukadi

Nayru was fuming at the absurdity of her fellow candidates. Jars of clearly labeled poison? False walls? Incrimination? What was this, a badly written ballad of Holder intrigue.

And then a cook collapsed. Nayru froze for a moment. But only a moment. Several of the canddiates were off doing their own thing, but that was their business. The rest of them didn't need to be here; Pyeta had the right idea. She gave him a nod, then stood on a chair and clapped her hands. "Fellow candidates," she called in her most authoritative voice. "This area is no longer safe, so make your way back to the barracks. A few of us are going to stay behind to make sure the healers can take our statements, and I'll be getting the candidatemasters in a moment, but until then, we're in the way. Let's clear out." She hopped off the chair and started ushering candidates out of the room, focusing on the younger ones.

"I think everyone who touched the body should stay here to talk to the healers," she said quietly to Pyeta and Mukadi. "You can get checked out, just to make sure you're not going to get sick." She stopped to give Miguel a slightly pitying look. The woman was gone. He was wasting his time. She shook her head and then returned to her task of ushering people out.

[Arcane]

TW: Death

The woman was still. Almost peaceful looking. But her chest wasn't moving. She wasn't breathing. She had to breathe. People couldn't live without breath.

He stared blankly as Miguel, as he tried to force breath into her lungs, as she lay, still and unmoving, without so much as a scream.

"Is-is she dead?" Pyeta asked, even though deep down, he already knew.

He had never seen a dead body before. Even when the mudslides came, he had been spared the sight of the dead left behind.

Bile rose in his throat, quicker than he swallowed it down. He leaned to the side before he retched.

At least he could avoid getting it on the woman...woman's corpse...

He nodded, when Nayru told him to stay, to see the healers.

The woman had just been alive, and now she wasn't. Right in front of him. Just like that.

[Fel]

"No, I really don't want to be the one to find anything." Chaneil rolled his eyes as Miguel started apparently composing a limerick about him, then took a step back away from the other Candidate's musical antics. "And I don't particularly want to heal anyone either, much less the whole Weyr."

He knew how much work Healers had to put in. Less physical labor than other Crafters, sure. But instead they had to spend Turns and Turns studying to do a difficult job caring for people that Chaneil didn't particularly want to bother caring about. Plus they had to deal with bodily fluids, which were just gross. He knew the life of a rider was difficult, but at least riders were heroes. Healers were just sort of glorified drudges, only the messes they cleaned up were people's bodies.

His attention was drawn by the sudden sounds of commotion and the sudden, blissful cessation of the sounds coming from Miguel. (He was sure the music was played very skillfully, but he simply didn't know the difference and didn't care to learn.) A cook on the ground. People trying to help, or not. One Candidate... throwing up. Once again, bodily fluids.

The cook wasn't breathing.

Chaneil took a step back, averting his eyes. "You shouldn't touch that," he said, not even sure if Miguel could hear him. That. Not her. It was easier to let his thoughts slide past things he'd rather—that was a dead body—not think about if he used that word. "Whatever happened, it might be contagious."

He was vaguely aware of Nayru telling people to leave, and that seemed like a good idea. A wonderful idea. He could absolutely leave Miguel to his surely-contaminated state. But something wasn't right. He couldn't just leave. And then he realized what the problem was.

"Soapy water. We're supposed to have been doing dishes. We should have wrinkly hands. We should at least get our hands and sleeves wet with soapy water." He didn't know why that thought seemed so very, very important just then. "Or else we might get into trouble."