“Damn. Damn damn damn.” Finally getting to that awful scene, pushing past her colleagues, cane in hand…”Curses!” Crouching down for but a moment, she almost immediately shot back up, turning away to lean against one of the alley’s walls shakily. Pausing for a moment, she unbelted a strap from her mask, allowing for her to take a deep breath…then puke out a portion of blood. Rushing, always rushing, yet just about too late, once again. Situations like these, seeing corpses like that…it filled her with quite a bit of despair.

Recomposing herself after a minute, she pulled out her pipe and lit it with some trouble, “Augh. Once again, our dear Ripper isn’t so picky, but I see he hasn’t been so greedy this time either. Though the Ripper wasn’t so gentle with our victim, the cranial area seems to be almost perfectly intact…” She could almost imagine the poor girl being attacked in such a brutal manner…and yet…head intact. Through the first strike, the struggle…maybe they hadn’t arrived in time to save her, but they had arrived in time to prevent the last brutalization of the body.

Taking a puff, then a second of her pipe…barely shielding it from the rain. “So, what’s the official story going to be this time? What is going to be submitted to the town hall’s public record? Accident? Sudden illness? Or, are we going to call a murder a murder?”

If they failed to lessen the number of victims through prevention, the right way, they had to do it some other way. It wasn’t a matter of just submitting false reports; manipulating public records…everything was in the name of preventing panic from spreading, maintaining this false sense of what some people deluded themselves into believing was normalcy. Part of her felt like this dishonesty was doing the victim a disservice, but the other part of her thought it much better that this girl’s parents not know that the she had been slit open and robbed in the worst kind of way.