Mo grimaces, just briefly, before schooling her expression. "Fair enough. Sounds like kind of a rough deal to me but maybe I'm underestimating the prestige." Valuable to know that necromancers tend to be the more vulnerable sort, though.

"So, what can you—"

Camilla stops when they enter the atrium with Gideon.

"Duel's off. Seventh never turned up, and they're not in their quarters. I also don't know anything about our bonus person. Let's move."

Gideon nods, stands, and turns down one of the other hallways, walking quickly, but not running. The floor is wet from the rain.

"Come on, let's follow her.

"So, what can you and your outfit do?"

"Fly, and move quickly in general, mostly." Mo levitates briefly again for the sake of demonstration. "Plus it's pretty durable, and protects me from most kinds of damage." She puffs her chest a little in a show of confidence in the face of (possibly) real danger.

"And this is common where you're from?"

Camilla is trying not to show disbelief on her face or in her voice, but she's slipping a little. This is almost certainly not necromancy, but if there was something besides necromancy that could do this she would know, because Palamedes would have researched it: therefore, this is either an unknown power or a secret one.

"I don't think so? I only know of, like, a dozen other kids with Monsters, maybe another half-dozen Freaks, and as far as I'm aware that's everybody in the city. I know the east and west coasts both have their own groups, we had a Freak from the east coast come in town one time who was trying to make a name for himself by picking on us. I can only assume other countries have some too." Mo considers it seriously for a moment. "If I had to guess, there might be, like, a few hundred Monsters and Freaks all told, maybe a thousand, for the whole Earth?"

The Outfit jostles on her shoulders, distinctly pulling her around a bit, which seems to remind her of something.

"Oh yeah. Monsters and Freaks aren't really, like, common knowledge, either. Monsters all have ways of hiding from normal people, when they aren't already pretty innocuous like the Outfit is, and Freaks get black-bagged if they're not careful about what powers they show so they're all real careful about keeping it low-key. So I guess it's possible there's more than I know about and they're just better at hiding than I and my friends back home are at finding them."

"The bad news is that appearing here rules out 'low key'. The good news is that there are fewer than nineteen people on this planet and I don't imagine they'll black bag you. The other bad news is that whoever is killing people might try and kill you."

Camilla looks like she might want to say something else but that's when Gideon leads them out into a conservatory, made nearly opaque by heavy rain, the inside fogged up and the outside covered in sheets of water. A few broken glass panels let rain in.

On the wet flagstones, a sickly thin woman with veins showing through her pale white skin lies facedown, a pair of crutches scattered next to her.

"Yeah, I think I've pretty thoroughly blown my cover. Hopefully it's not a big--"

Mo's words are cut as she grimaces at the scene. She isn't entirely unfamiliar with death, but with everyone keeping things secret back home, its rare for there to be...evidence, like this. It's surprisingly uncomfortable.

She wonders if she could fly away from here, but at the same time knows that the Outfit couldn't countenance that.

"So, is this whole murder mystery deal part of the, uh, 'contest', or someone trying to stop it?" Mo asks as much to distract herself from the body as out of any real curiosity.

Camilla will quickly kneel next to the body and turn her over. Her skin is blue and her body is slack.

And then she’ll cough up a truly alarming amount of blood and shakily breathe in a few times. She looks around, lingering on Mo for just a moment, and settles on Gideon.

"He never came back."

And then she faints.

Camilla will help lift her up into Gideon’s arms while she answers Mo’s question.

"It’s not really even a contest—nothing stops all of us from succeeding, supposedly—so our best guess is stop it, or a side effect of it—some be necromantic monster accidentally loosed, I mean.”

"Uh!" That's a lot to process in just a few seconds. This whole place's shtick is necromancy, she really shouldn't be surprised by people who look ready to be buried deciding to get up. She's already tried to be cautious about their capacity to damage her, but thinking of them as being similar to Monsters in terms of durability might be smart too. "Fair enough. Any idea who the 'he' who never came back was?"

"Her cavalier, presumably. He's been helping her around, if he never came back that would be why she's been lying here."

Camilla catches sight of Mo's face.

"Not all necromancers are this frail. She's got a degenerative genetic disorder that will probably kill her before she's 25."

"Ah! Okay. I, uh...thought she was dead, I guess. Though if this 'Lord Undying' guy is special I shouldn't be expecting people to be coming back regularly. Anyway, hopefully someone can find that cavalier."

Camilla grimaces at the last part.

"Someone found a cremated body recently. I don't think it's been identified yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's him."

To Gideon: "Come on, let's take her to her rooms and then go get help."

Back to Mo, once Gideon starts walking: "The Lord Undying is actually the only one who has ever managed resurrection. It's considered impossible, none of the theorists have any idea how he did it. She was probably just—very close to death. It's not that hard to bring people back from very close to death, if their thalergy hasn't been converted into thanergy yet."

Mo nods. That tracks, mostly, if this is a place where 'life energy' and 'death energy' are concretely measurable things. She's pretty sure that she's seen some Monsters bring back dead people, but the Outfit certainly can't, at least not as far as it's shared with her, so she'll hold her tongue on that front.Instead, she'll just follow them all to wherever this lady's rooms are. Along the way, she'll ask, "So, any chance that having someone who can fly will help with the investigation?"

"A lot of the exploration of Canaan House has been limited by which parts of it we can safely get to. Although you'll need a necromancer with you for some things—how much can you carry while flying? and we should ask Teacher whether or not flying to unreachable places is allowed under the rules...

"Sorry, that was from the perspective of helping with the original challenge we are here for, not the mysterious deaths. Hopefully your flight and durability will let you survive whatever is causing it. If you're attacked, run and gather more support. Right now we have no idea what is causing it and that's rather hampering our ability to combat it."

"I don't actually know exactly how much I can lift?If it's with just my hands..." She thinks back to the various times she's lifted her friends over her shoulders as a show of strength, before she found the Outfit and had more interesting ways to show off, "Maybe like a couple hundred pounds at most, for just a few seconds? But if we can set up a harness around my shoulder I genuinely don't know what my upper limit is."

She'll not along at the suggestion to run and gather support, even if both she and the Outfit are kind of dying to know how well they'd do in a fight against whoever, or whatever, is going around killing people.

"We should test that, but none of the necromancers here weigh more than 150 pounds, so you should be good. Maybe even a necromancer and their cav, if we're lucky. Let's plan on getting Septimus to her room and then go get my necromancer. Then we can plan next steps. Any objections?"

Mo certainly doesn't have any.

The Outfit is getting kind of bored, but not bored enough to start picking fights for no reason. Not yet at least.