Motive
"Ah, Professor," recognized Oliver when the Professor and Claire entered the throne room. "I was soon on my way to locate the two of you. You have just saved me a trip."
"Always happy to help," said the Professor with a tone that said he had no intention of claiming credit from a coincidence. He was, however, more interested in finding out what questions Oliver had. "What is it you need from me?"
"Us," Claire corrected him.
"Right. What she said."
Oliver looked at the samurai men who still guarded each entrance and exit to the room. Much as he wanted to speak with the Professor more privately, the samurai were tasked with maintaining the peace and security while the regency—consisting of himself, Captain Harris, and Dr. Asher—possessed temporary rule of the empire. As such, he held no real command over the samurai until a new emperor ascended.
Instead, he lowered his voice. "I hoped you might have some information about the new pokémon creatures that Harris and his men spotted within the late emperor's new place of worship."
"There's not much to tell," he answered. "They're called unown, mostly because not a whole lot is known about them. What is known is they shape themselves like written characters and spend a lot of time lying dormant."
"Could they be responsible for the Emperor's death?"
"Certainly not. The unown are mostly harmless."
Oliver stated, "A man in my position has much greater knowledge than the average citizen. I know of this word psychic you used earlier. It means those pokémon can enter and influence the minds of men, does it not?"
"Psychic is a broad term," Claire pointed out. "Some psychic types can read minds, but some have little more than the ability to influence the positions of items around a room."
"Aha. Then does it not also follow those pokémon can influence the health of a beloved emperor?"
"That's a fair suspicion," the Professor agreed, "but I give you the utmost guarantee that unown cannot actually read minds or hear thoughts. They can detect a person's emotional state and they tend to respond enthusiastically, but they do not possess any sort of ability to influence emotions."
"What about other internal controls?" Oliver pressed. A single bead of sweat appeared along his hairline. He seemed almost desperate to find the Emperor's killer. "If they can move items around a room, surely it is not much of a stretch to move the Emperor's organs around his body and kill him that way."
The Professor shook his head and began to walk away, speaking without concern for the guards overhearing. "What you're suggesting doesn't make any sense. The unown lack any motive for killing Alph. It would be one thing if their power caused some sort of rupture that he got caught up in, but that didn't happen. He died peacefully in his room alone. He was fifty-three years old. In this day and age, that's well past the average man's lifespan."
But then a look crossed the Professor's face Claire couldn't quite place. He turned dramatically to face Oliver and pointed. "Why are you so eager to place the blame on the unown?"
"I am merely being thorough in my investigation," Oliver answered. "I do not appreciate the accusation."
"I haven't accused anyone of anything. But you are awfully insistent in accusing a few pokémon of murdering a human they've never met. It makes me wonder if you have some ulterior reason for presenting the face of an investigation."
Oliver's face bloated and turned bright red. "Such insolence! My only aim is to find the truth."
"Aren't you hiding something?" the Professor prodded.
"I'll have no more of this." Oliver stormed off in a huff.
Before he made it out of the room, the Professor said to him, "Alph selected Jomon to be his successor, yet you still have him detained. Is it fair for me to assume that the good emperor determined Jomon to be not only older but the better leader?"
Oliver accepted the opportunity to save face by shifting the blame from himself. "Penta will make an equal emperor. He is much wiser than his brother." With that, he completed his storm-off.
Claire looked thoughtfully to the Professor. "Do you really think the chamber chief was responsible for Alph's death?"
"Not really, but look how squirrely he got. He's definitely hiding something. If he's not responsible, I get the feeling he's covering up for whomever is responsible."
"I don't know." She leaned in to whisper so the guards couldn't hear. "I wouldn't be surprised if the guards were involved. They're everywhere at all times: They have access to everything and everyone, plus they knew they have a convenient scapegoat in the unown."
"Preposterous, Claire. The samurai are an intensely loyal group bound by a strict code of honor. They don't even go to the bathroom without an order from their commander."
Claire motioned as if to display a possibility the Professor himself just presented. "So maybe Captain Harris is the one responsible. He's one of the omnipresent samurai, he's in apposition to have Alph's trust, and any of these guards would readily die for him."
The Professor made a face as he struggled with the proposal. "I don't know. It doesn't sound like any code of honor for a devout samurai to follow. Besides, Harris hasn't really the motive. Killing Alph does nothing to help his social standing. He gains no more wealth or good fortune with it."
"What about Oliver? No wealth gained there. He's still not part of the bloodline, and there are two princes from whom to select a new emperor."
The Professor tapped his chin and stroked the beard he did not have. "Yes, that's true. Two potential new emperors do carry with them the strongest motives for Alph's murder." He paused for a moment and smacked his forehead a few times with his fist. "I just can't think of how they did it. There was not a trace on the body… That really does make it sound as if a pokémon were involved."
"Have you seen the body yourself?"
"What do you mean?"
Claire made a face. "I mean, did you actually view the body or did you just take someone's word for it that Alph had no marks on him."
The Professor put on a stern visage, pointed straight up for a moment, paused, and then pointed directly at his cohort. "Claire, you are potentially a genius. That was too simple for me to think up on my own." He turned and motioned her to follow him. "Let's go pay the good Dr. Asher a visit."
The silence covering the Temple of Alph was broken when footsteps began to echo the marble structures. They were the slow footsteps signaling the approach of a teenage man bearing a semi-permanent scowl upon his face. Four steps into the temple, the shoed footsteps of a man were drowned out by the thunderous echo of a rhyhorn's heavy leg. Each step from the man-sized rhinoceros sparked the attention of the energetic unown, prompting them to swarm the younger prince and his pokémon guardian. The unown kept a fair distance from him, but their circling built up static in the air and caused Penta's red robes to billow.
Penta was startled by the sudden activity of these frightening creatures. Each had a single eye that never blinked but stared incessantly, watching every shift in his gait, every nervous twitch as his eyes darted from unown to unown. His rhyhorn noticed his tension and braced itself, awaiting the order to strike.
"What are you?" he asked them.
They responded by shifting their positions in the air and producing mellow cries, but their communication was incomprehensible to the visitor.
"Do you really possess the power to affect your surroundings without making physical contact?"
The unown all stared for a moment. Maybe they couldn't understand Penta's question, or maybe they didn't appreciate the question and refused to answer, or maybe they were trying to figure out how to show him what they could do. The anticipation made him twitchy, nervous. He felt his fingers tingle and goose bumps covered his skin.
But it wasn't anticipation. The temperature was falling dramatically. It wasn't long before the silk sleeves of Penta's robe began to crackle under a cake of frost. His rhyhorn cried uncomfortably in the cold. The temperature slowed its metabolism and suffered the rhyhorn incredibly subcutaneous pain. As a battler and proof of Penta's right to the throne, it was losing its strength.
"Stop," Penta uttered through chattering teeth. "I approve."
The temperature didn't rise, but its decline halted. The climate air entered the temple again and reminded Penta of the air outside—proof positive of the power the unown possessed. Wherever they come from and for whatever reason, they held true power. With power like that at his beck and whim, his father's murder was no longer necessary to obtain the throne.
The unown watched Penta motionlessly.
"Did you hear me? I approve of your power. You even bested the mighty rhyhorn. Your power is unmatched and I will have it supporting my reign." His vigor and excitement pushed him past the pain of the frost and enabled him to speak firmly and strongly to the pokémon. A strong speaker, he knew, was a strong leader. Pokémon responded only to the word of an emperor with true strength. "I command you to give your power to me!"
He was convinced the unown would follow as requested. They all drooped in the air as if to acquiesce. Just as his emotions welled up inside and he envisioned his rule, Penta felt incredible pain in his belly. He lurched in an attempt to dull the pain, but it expanded despite his effort. His insides twisted around and compounded the pain. His stomach fell empty like it dropped down to his feet.
The unown glared at Penta with reddened eyes. Their bodies vibrated with synchronized resonation.
Penta let out a voiceless roar as he felt every muscle fiber in his body rip apart. Within mere moments, his body disappeared—his entire existence vanished.
The eyes of the unown returned to their former, peaceful color, and the pokémon resumed their positions drifting through the air of the temple.
The morgue was much cleaner than Claire expected. She thought cleanliness was neglected this far back in time, long before knowledge of pathogens and contaminants were as prevalent as in the modern day. Yet Dr. Asher kept the room well organized and very clean, although the organization may have been out of necessity. The morgue was filled with the bodies of deceased citizens and perished livestock. She counted two mareep, a nidoran of each sex, and what looked like an ancestor of a bellsprout. All were cut open from earlier autopsies.
"What say, good doctor?" asked the Professor.
"Professor," Dr. Asher recognized. His look of surprise was magnified behind his thick glasses, causing the Professor to react with a start and Claire to bust out laughing. Asher removed the glasses from his face and assumed a more serious expression. "Forgive me. How can I help you?"
"I was hoping to see our dearly departed emperor's body."
"That's impossible," Asher replied. "No one else may view Emperor Alph III's body."
"Yeah, yeah. The Emperor's body is sacred," Claire mocked. When the Professor looked cross at her, she said, "What? I've noticed a theme around here." To Dr. Asher, she said, "We have a few questions about his death and want to verify your autopsy findings."
"My findings are immaculate," Asher insisted. He looked hurt by the assertion that he missed something.
"We do not question what you found," the Professor clarified. "We are simply curious about what you didn't find. We're from out of town, and so we'd only like to offer a second set of eyes. And a third set. Unless you have an assistant or something who already helped and we'd actually be offering a third and fourth set of eyes."
Dr. Asher held up a hand. "I understand. You were invited here personally by Emperor Alph, and so I will allow you to accept personal privileges. But if I am questioned regarding your contact with the Emperor's body, I will claim you threatened me and detained me with your pokémon."
"Fair enough," Claire accepted. Who was going to know they were there, anyway?
The mortician led Claire and the Professor to a side door hiding the autopsy room. It wasn't cooled, but it didn't smell much worse than everything else did pre-plumbing. Asher still had a little time to remove the bodies before they completely destroyed the scent of the morgue. Three male and one female body lay on three of the tables Asher past as he led the guests to the second room where Emperor Alph's body had its privacy.
"Who are they?" the Professor asked.
"Two hunters, a would-be warrior, and a concubine. The hunters were positioned on the hilltop when the ground gave way and dropped them twelve meters onto some jagged rocks." They had open wounds in their bodies, most notably in their skulls. "The warrior was attempting to command his flaafy in a battle against a rhydon when both he and the sheep fell into a fissure." The boy's skin showed the many broken bones he suffered. "The concubine was sentenced to death for venturing outside of the harem." She was missing her right hand.
"Alph had a harem?" Claire asked incredulously.
"Remember the times," the Professor reminded her gently. He pointed her to the second room. "The Emperor, remember?"
After Dr. Asher showed them into the room with Alph's body, he simply said, "Excuse me" and left the room.
"Let's have a quick look-see, shall we?" The Professor pulled the decorative cover from Alph's body to get a better look. After he and Claire both gave the body a thorough examination, he realized Dr. Asher was correct when he said there was no physical trauma present on the body. The closest things were frail forearms, slight calluses on his fingertips, and minor skin irritation in his pelvic region. And the autopsy cuts.
"What's next?" Claire asked, also realizing they didn't have a microscope or an incubator to study blood cultures.
The next best thing, the Professor brandished his sonic screwdriver. As the activated the glowing geode, he ran the device up and down Alph's body once, then stopped the device and turned to look at the results.
"No internal injuries," he noted. "Poison."
"Poison? What kind? Arsenic? Cyanide?"
"No, a biological agent. A completely natural poison taken straight from a living creature."
"Could it be a bellsprout? Or whatever the ancestor from this age is called? They're poisonous. If he ate one of those by accident, that might do it."
"Feeding it to him would do the trick, too," the Professor agreed. "But that scenario seems unlikely. The Emperor has a personal cook who never does the gardening himself, and no bellsprout would just sit in a garden without resisting when picked. It definitely seems more plausible Alph was injected with something. But he lacks puncture marks."
Claire considered books and television shows she witnessed in which a character was murdered via poison. "Isn't skin irritation another indicator of poison?"
Curious, the Professor examined Alph's irritation, nervous about looking too closely at that particular location. "Are you suggesting someone poisoned his… junior emperor?"
Shrugging, she said, "It's possible, isn't it?"
He smiled at her. "Impressive deduction for an archaeologist. Let's keep it going. The only people who could poison him there would be his wives or concubines. A butler may help him dress but would never be able to touch him. And I can't really imagine a scenario in which his sons would want to."
"Then… Is it a coincidence we have a dead concubine in the other room?"
The Professor darted back to the side of the autopsied concubine. He immediately examined her wrist with the missing hand. "This is not how she died." Showing the wrist to Claire, he elaborated, "See how there's no blood gathering around the wound? That suggests her hand was cut off post mortem, or after she died."
"I know what post mortem means," she replied while the Professor scanned the concubine with his sonic screwdriver.
"The same traces of poison as Alph. They both died from the same substance."
Claire looked over her shoulder to check for Dr. Asher. He wasn't nearby. Whispering, she asked, "Is Dr. Asher the one responsible for Emperor Alph's murder? He could have cut this concubine's hand off to hide the fact that she died from the same poison as the Emperor."
Suddenly the door behind them slammed shut, and a loud clacking sound suggested it was locked.
The Professor watched the door for a moment before looking to Claire with a clueless expression. "You could be right about him."