Idea For A Farce

Throughout the past weeks, Iris had unconsciously attempted to find flaws in her relationship so that she no longer would need to invest into it. The center of her human animal was latched upon suffering, and loneliness she had found manageable, so always would there be that attempt to return to such inward nature; only through the deepening of the reservoir of her spirit could there be a differencing of what she might draw upon.

In the meantime she tried to sublimate such through the projection of herself into Suki and work. But she bought many gifts for Olivia; jewelry, mostly, paid for by quick delivery contracts. She felt that because her last relationship with Amelie had not worked out so well, perhaps if she were to pretend through some of this it would spur feelings in actuality. In reality the contracts were a method that she might sublimate this tight internal morass. Thank-yous and kisses for gifts were easier to deal with than emotion.

Their sex improved well. Olivia was a very sexual woman with Iris, and many times she had told Iris directly she loved how she fucked her. It was good sex and Olivia almost always orgasmed, as did Iris; she loved to make Olivia cum. Yet a reserve still held Iris back from full attachment, and she worried she could not find the origin of this self-loathing, seemingly buoyed by a medium not of her own creation. For Iris the filth of such interactions were in inverse correlation to the sterility she sought towards Olivia, the expressions of sexuality the inverse her expressions of intimacy. 

She recalled she had seen once, as a teenager, a man fucking a woman against the glass window of a hotel, and wondered if perhaps she could ask Olivia to do the same, to pull their relationship from the abstraction it currently existed as to her mind. 

As she often did, she tried to think through how Natasha might have. Though it had lowered in the months since her death, still in Iris was that attempt to inhabit Natasha and her patterns, to make more explainable life by adopting the habits of one who had seemed to know more about Iris than herself. She had really never known Natasha's thoughts on romance or love, and she had noted in Natasha a discomfort with sex unexplainable by only harassment, a genuine trauma that she had responded to by retreating fully into her parka.

Sex was usually easy for Iris, and she held little inhibitions towards it. But she recalled some of the conversations with Olivia about sex and what Iris wanted, and she usually became confused; she defined herself too much by what she did to others, leaving little room to consider what was done to herself. She murdered criminals; she possessed a protege; she solved investigations; she fucked Olivia. But whenever she considered what she wanted done to herself, Iris was unsure. Perhaps the method of thinking was so she would not view herself as a victim: if she possessed a mentor who had died, it meant that she was not someone whose mentor died on her.

In late August Iris & Suki were called up to Naomi's office, who was there alone while her squadron was training.

"So, this should be a quick investigation. Woman murdered in a public park, probably by the man she swore she would always love and who swore would always protect her, happens every day." said Naomi quite hetero-pessimistically. "But since this'll be the first contract for Suki, I want to assign you with Eva and Amelie, so all of your proteges can see a range of mentoring styles."

"Have they already tested her husband?" said Iris.

"They have, actually, but I like your initiative. Lemme send the information over."

Iris nodded and left with Suki. Soon she unfortunately met with Eva and fortunately met with Amelie outside of Urasaria. Eva waited until Amelie was out of earshot to turn to Iris and grin. "So, you and Olivia. Go ahead, tell me I was right."

Iris sighed. "You were right, Eva."

"Hell yeah I was." said Eva, then whispered: "Lucky bitch."

Iris smiled, yet she felt uneased; she had instantly increased her standing with Eva merely by dating Olivia, yet she knew how such views affected Olivia. Other women on campus thought her lucky to be dating Olivia, but she did not feel so herself. The calm and stability Olivia possessed had become inverted, to what made her a good friend now made her a poor girlfriend: or so did Iris attempt to rationalize these feelings she had over Olivia. This was not so much of an issue in sex, but romanticism was what caused Iris to shrivel. She still was not sure whether it was right to inflict herself upon Olivia.

They left for Greensburg, and though the other four would go talk to the civilian police for details, Iris would not. She decided to go directly to the wilderness preserve where the woman's body had been found.

On their way there Suki asked: "Why aren't we talking to the cops? I thought that was just a Urasaria thing, but everyone else is doing it. Why aren't you?"

"Well, Suki." Iris stroked her chin. "I could tell you it's partially because I've got a better ability to verify what's happened than whatever narrative they've constructed for themselves, but the main reason? I had an investigation involving the police a few months ago. We were called in to investigate a recent string of murdered girls out in Penrose. When we arrived, we were told by the police that we were no longer needed; that somehow they had caught the killer host and he had confessed. We had to force ourselves in to speak with him, and once his lawyer showed up and talked to him, we realized what had occured; the police had exploited the stupidity of this innocent man and woven it in to a false testimony, preferring laziness over investigation and coerced lies over objective facts.

They wouldn't listen to us when we pointed this out, so we decided to work with his defense to exonerate him. As I later found out, he wasn't wholly a pacifist, but he never commit the crime he was charged with; he was a helplessly naive son of a bitch, but he wasn't a child-killer. He had been buttressed about by an invisible world of corruption and falsehoods, his limited mind unable to fathom that larger system of relations under which his life became wholly subject to. My pity ebbed from him as our investigation continued, yet we still needed to find the murderous host, limited though we were by that system of civilian laws.

Once the police found out what we were doing, they regarded us as enemies. They started baselessly harassing us and demanded we choose a coerced lie over an objective reality. They accused me and Olivia of tampering with evidence, and they used the media to slander her and I as supporting a child-killer; a fact I blame both them and journalists who idiotically parrot them uncritically for. They knew their audience would believe anything written about us so long as it had a police name attached to it, and though I had a mind to exert some of my boil upon them directly, I recognized that the only right emotion to feel was to give no sympathy to them and expect none from them.

What's funny is that it only took a day before I had already figured out the true killer was attempting to frame another man, someone the police hadn't even an iota of suspicion for nor even knew existed; a malicious trick that collapsed before it could scale that wall of police ignorance. He had been foolish enough to take at face value what the police say about themselves, content as most Americans are to believe that perverse national mythology built around them, focusing only on the most overt examples of police violence and not a much wider and subtler system of cruelty that the media won't cover. 

Yet, once we did find the subject, we couldn't kill him; the upcoming trial to prove our man's innocence required that there still be another body to confess for him. We had his Revenant removed, and at the lawyer's request, brought him to the police for interrogation. The following morning, he had been released. They say they found nothing of interest, but I've the suspicion that it was yet another expression of police resentment towards us; that their pettiness overrode what slim urge for justice laid in them and they thought only to exert their individualism rather than succeed by collaboration. He escaped, this man who killed five small girls. Even if he's no longer a host and I doubt he could become one again, that's still too luminous a nightmare for it not to ember in me any time I think again about working with civilian police. I've got no sympathy for them and I expect none from them."

"Oh. Yeah, I don't really like cops either."

Iris was astonished. "…anyway. Let's head over."

They headed to that wilderness reserve, which was essentially a park located within a nature trail; imagine as many trees as you prefer, so long as there is a swamp near it. It was at this saltwater swamp that the woman's body had risen ashore at, deep enough that Iris decided not to step inside; she formed a platform of hail for herself and crouched stop it with Suki.

"Kairos: Timeline."

She spread her webs thinly and widely across the surface, then crouched down and focused. After an hour, she fluctuated events around where the woman's body had been found; she curiously never saw it dropped into the water, yet it came up from below as if buoyed from some lower pressure.

"Brought up from deeper down." she muttered. "She wasn't dropped into here. She came up from below. Going to need to dip down there. I'll clear a space, unless you'd like to give me some gills."

Suki did not respond. Iris sighed as she accelerated the evaporation of the swamp below, obsidian walls forming her own personal dried crater as she lowered her platform into the former deeps and focused for another Timeline. After a past era had been constructed, she glanced down and noticed invisible holes in the bottom of the swamp, yet they did not cause the marsh around them to collapse; thus they existed in reality and were a host aura in her Timeline. Tentatively, she struck one with a bolt of white lightning: it did not appear to budge, though she could not know it yet regardless.

For now she set the woman's corpse down. At death she had been covered in a mix of swamp and invisible globs of something; Iris did not touch them, but figured them to be of the same host aura as below. 

"Deep marks around her arms." she muttered. "No visible source, but it's actively applying pressure. Means she was constricted when she died. Corpses in Timeline… stamped at time of death with what they're wearing and carrying." With her wind she sliced open the woman's chest and noted fluid in her lungs: she had drowned, although on what Iris could not know. "And drowned. Can't say which killed her first, but I can make a few assumptions. Whoever did this was wary they would be caught or linked to this somehow. She was kept starving for days before death. The host likely never showed in this area precisely so he could have an alibi when he decided to dump her here. It's a long-range Revenant… very long." Iris sighed. "Doubt there's much more I can do today, though."

"Yeah, I got to just wait around for two hours while you got to do all the investigating."

Iris was tired and realized she should not really entertain this, but being Iris did so regardless: "Wasn't anything preventing you from coming down there with me and helping me out afterwards, but I suppose it's easier to bitch than to work." She rubbed the back of her neck. "Sorry. Shouldn't have said that. I can only do about two or three Timelines a day before I start getting too exhausted, and I'd prefer to stay on the lower limit of that."

Suki merely rolled her eyes and said nothing.

Iris returned back to her personal dried crater, noting that where there had been a host aura in Timeline were discolored segments of swamp in reality. Tentatively, she slashed at them again with her wind; no wound appeared. She tried to decay some of the normal swamp around them, yet more swamplike material seeped from these tunnels or roots to prevent their collapse. Checking the woman's corpse again, she noted those formerly-invisible globs were of the same material; she supposed to a civilian eye they might appear of the same swamp.

She pulled a spike off her jacket and threw it into one glob; it was ultrahardened and her spike could not penetrate it. "…can't tell what that indicates. If he was trying to destroy her belongings, he could've done it before death. Might have to ask… Amelie to cut into it, or my drills…" For a moment she withdrew her host aura from her clothes and reverted them to how they had been this morning. With a hook of wind she carried the woman's corpse out, nodding to Suki, who began walking back with her as a man approached them in the park.

"Is that that woman that got killed?" he said.

"Yeah." said Suki.

'God damnit.' thought Iris.

"Aww, jeez. I hope she didn't suffer too much."

"Did you know her?" said Iris. 

"Yeah- well, I never talked to her or nothing, but I read her obituary. She was some therapist serving the needy. I never saw her around here, though, and I tend to be here a looooot. I just love observing people. It kinda makes my mind leave my body for a while, you know?"

"I suppose…"

"God, the other day... can I tell you about something? I just saw these two homeless men the other day. They were fucking the brains out of this homeless woman. Just beating the brakes off her, sexually speaking."

"This isn't relevant to my investigation."

"No, it totally is, keep going." nodded Suki.

Iris attempted not to listen, but he continued with the rest of it. He confessed that he had seen two homeless men fucking a homeless woman recently, clarified that all three seemed to be enjoying themselves, elsewise he would have felt guiltier than he already did for having masturbated to such. Even odder than this to Iris was that he seemed not ashamed of masturbating to three strangers, but that all three were homeless.

"You didn't see anyone dragging or dumping her body here, correct?" said Iris a little strained.

"Oh. Nah, I didn't. But I could be a good witness if you ever need one."

"Clearly so. If I need you again, where can I find you?"

"Oh, I've been living in my car for the past nine months."

Iris nodded, then hurriedly wind-carried the woman's corpse back to her truck. She dumped it into the bed of her truck, then tried to close it; it did not close fully. "One second." She picked it up manually and adjusted her diagonally, then slammed shut the bed door and heard a crunch, smiled autonomously, realized the crunch was the woman's corpse and not the skull of an enemy host, then hurriedly reverted her back to her death stamp, which caused her to slam into the side of the bed as she attempted to return to where she was found; Iris grabbed her with the one-handed grip of a host and accidentally snapped her in half, causing one half of her to fly back to the swamp and the other to shudder unnaturally in her hand.

She groaned and a blade of wind slashed the woman's finger off, which she put in her pocket as she threw the rest of her off into the parking lot. "God damnit, I'll just fucking go back for her later. It'll be a post-death movement, so I should be able to move it without using Timeline." She sighed. "And I'd like to check with Amelie and Eva and see if there's any information that isn't already obvious from what I have here."