Rudy Rudeanu, Nelly Hacke, Nicola Hoffman
Cowritten by @Tesserach, [@Framining A Moose], Dyelli Beybi
Southside Cemetery
Amidst the cool, darkened streets of nightime in Munich, Rudeanu held the lantern from his right hand, his other lingering near his side. The man's breath could be seen rising from his lips as the crossed the threshold from where the Munich streetlights glowed warmly into the darkened recesses of the trees that covered Alter Südfriedhof. "Let's see what we find, shall we?" He slowly cast the lantern around, illuminating the darkened forms of trees, monuments and grave markers, his eyes scanning their surroundings, and occasionally sweeping into the treeline and shop or house windows that surrounded the cemetery.
Nicola stuck close to Rudy. She looked jumpy, glancing hurriedly between the shadows, "This place gives me the creeps," she muttered under her breath.
Nelly lingered behind the pair, her palm still pressed flat against her left eye as she held her knife in the other. Her uncovered eye flitted about as they passed by the rows of headstones, nothing of note jumping out of them right away - neither figuratively nor literally.
"Should check the fresher graves," she commented gruffly, before puckering her lips. "See if any of the victims could afford a plot."
"There is a mass grave around here somewhere," Nicola declared, before adding, as if feeling she needed to explain herself, "All the killings in the city recently. They needed to dig one to get the bodies off the street."
Rudy remained quiet, swinging his arm with the lantern dangling from it in slow arcs that set the shadows of gravestones shifting in the light. "Aha, what's this?" He paused eyes fixed on something which he approached. "Aha! Dead meat will bring out the hounds."
He slowly sank onto one knee, lowering his head and lantern until the object of his interest became clear. A pile of shit. "Dog spoor. Note the fur. It means this animal's been hunting prey. Gone feral." His tone was unequivocally triumphant.
"I'll take your word for it," Nicola clearly did not want to be examining dog crap abd kept back a few paces, "Feral dogs are nothing new in the Republic," she added, playing the skeptic for a change, "It's a big step up from eating rats to killing a human though."
"Something killed those people. If we're talking creatures capable of taking an adult human inside Munich, the options I see are a person and dogs. I've yet to read a penny dreadful about some sort of repeat killer eating their victims mind you..." He paused thoughtfully. "I suppose we should contact Tierpark Hellabrunn and see if they've had any animals escape. I hear they're in some financial difficulty."
"Maybe you should taste it, just t'be sure," Nelly responded to the magician, seemingly perturbed by the man's smug satisfaction - and the support his hypothesis had found in the excretive evidence before them. She turned her back to the pair as Rudy examined the dung, peering into the darkness, even uncovering her eye to let her pre-adjusted pupil see what her other eye couldn't. "Somethin' still don't feel right, though...f'its dogs, why're we the first ones to do something about it? Folk like me go missing, I understand, but prostitutes...some've them must've had handlers, no?"
Rudy glanced over his shoulder at Nelly looking unamused, but he said nothing. He stood up instead, dusting his gloved hands together and adjusting his capelet over his shoulders. "Maybe they did. It's worth checking." He said to Nelly, a touch curtly as eyes surveyed the dimly lit windows occasionally visible through the sparsely leaved trees. "Good vantage points up and down the avenue too. Someone might've seen something. Maybe we can even find a room with a view to setup in. In the meantime, I figure we set bait around here." He gestured around the cemetery. "Good confirmation would be if any of the feral dogs we catch turn up with human flesh in their stomachs. Then I'd look at some of those 'handlers'. Or maybe there's something else connecting our victims we're unaware of. We rule those out, then - [i]maybe/i] we can start considering extraordinary possibilities that might actually involve Nachtewache."
Nicola raised an eyebrow in the darkness, "All that means is the dog fed on a body," she said, "People are left dead in the streets all the time. Would that be a surprise? Are we going to start saying everything the Freikorps or the Communists do was the work of dogs now as well?" she proposed before turning to Nelly, "I would assume the reason we know about these disappearances is because they have handlers or friends. But the police have armed thugs shooting up the city to deal with. A repeat killer would be able to operate undisturbed for the most part," she drew her coat about her as she finished, as if the thought made her feel a little colder.
"True, but we work with the evidence we have. Reports of bodies mauled by wild dogs - our mystery was that no dogs were sighted. But here's actual evidence they're here. Until we find bloody footprints, knife wounds or bullet casings there's no reason we should even be considering Freikorps, much less... repeat killers. If it's not dogs, the evidence will point the way." Rudy waived his free hand as though repeat killers were as outlandish an idea as supernatural creatures while picking his steps around the grave markers, taking care not to step on the graves themselves. "I would be curious to know who reported this and how Nachtewache became involved though. So far it looks to me like The Watch is passing mundane occurrences off as supernatural events. Still, as the scots would say, the case is not yet proven."
And they moved off into the darkness.
