Ask her for a magic belt instead.

Fabulous.

Wearing Gwen's tiara feels wrong on a gut level, but she is a rational creature and can overrule her gut when the situation calls for it. So, doing her best to ignore the squirming feeling that this is somehow a mistake, she equips the headband and allows the magic to worm its way into her mind…

No, focus on that disgusting feeling again. You've been feeling it all day. That's not apprehension about the headband, or Gwen, or the case you're working. What you're feeling is nicotine withdrawal.

MotherFUCKER—

She's a smoker?

Search your feelings, you know it to be true. But who knows how long it's been since you last had a smoke? You should find out, preferably by resetting the clock.

Priorities

1. NEW: Find a pack of cigarettes and send its contents to a fiery grave.
2. Solve the murder case.
3. Discover her own identity before the amnesia bites her in the ass any harder than it already has.
4. …?
5. Get a pair of shoes at some point, probably.

… wow, she has an addiction all right. How did she not notice that looming in the background?

Because you forgot. You could've gone this entire adventure without smoking once, if you hadn't thought of it! Congratulations on tearing the silver lining out.

Smoking is an expensive habit, not a moral failing. Save the self-recrimination for when you've done something actually heinous.

Smoking is also—

Tabled until there's something she can do about it. Now, speaking of heinous, is there anything about this crime scene that makes sense to a smarter version of herself? She's finding it much easier to ignore the nicotine cravings, despite now knowing what they are, which should make it easier to pick out the key elements of the mystery. Give up your secrets, dead man!

The corpse's arms are supinated, elbows resting on the ground with a minute degree of flexion, all ten fingers showing signs of abduction. Rigor mortis. The stiffness is real but doesn't match any plausible time of death – postmortem rigidity fades in the heat after six to eight hours.

Did you notice the putrid smell of death in the air? That's right, you didn't. The decomposition process is frozen in time.

Someone bothered to cast Gentle Repose… that's not much information, even if they didn't have a scroll the window of rigor mortis after the murder could've easily encompassed dawn. What else, what else?

No sign of a lethal wound. The facial disfigurement is too precise to have happened while this man was still conscious, and his armor is supporting the full weight of the boulder – it hasn't deformed from the pressure, not even a little. There's some dried blood on the head, neck and shoulders, but head wounds bleed freely enough that all of it could've come from the postmortem trauma. You'll need a full autopsy to do more than speculate on the cause of death.

First possibility: he died elsewhere, his corpse was brought to the Church of Humanity, and the facade was intentionally damaged to provide him with a tomb. Second possibility: this man wound up buried in rubble after a bout of mortal combat, then died from injuries sustained where we cannot see them or from a coup de grace. Third possibility: buried in rubble for a different reason and murdered by someone passing by… that doesn't seem likely. More contorted chains of events are less likely still. Prioritize the autopsy, if you can.

The first two scenarios are plausible but have troubling implications. The killer was able to destroy a large monument made of solid rock in the middle of the night, maybe as part of a battle. That's not trivial. It would've taken a large group of people working in concert, a heavyweight individual, or maybe a combination of both. They would've had good options for disposing of a body afterwards, potentially good enough to cover their tracks entirely. Why leave him here for us to find?

To send a message. Let's say you're right and we're looking at a dead adventurer. Whoever killed him gets to thinking about his allies – and he does have allies, because everyone knows adventurers travel in packs. Is there an inescapable reckoning on the horizon? It's hard to run from revenge, especially when the ones giving chase can hound you with divinations. You want to put them off the scent, but failing that you want to scare them into giving up. So you drop the dead guy in public, strip him of anything that could be used to trace you, and dare his buddies to do something about it.

If that's true, it puts a high ceiling on how much danger the two of them are about to walk into. The thing they need to know most urgently, even more than the autopsy results, is how powerful the victim was. His collection of magic items would've been a convenient benchmark, but obviously everything that wasn't nailed down has been looted already. All that's left is the armor. Gwen is in the process of casting Detect Magic – that cantrip is going to get a workout today, she can feel it – so they'll at least know whether he died in a magic cuirass.

On the bright side, he might have associates interested in vengeance. That's definitely going to make their lives easier!

There's more to see on the surface. Looks like an adult male human, although demihuman isn't out of the question. Ethnically Taldane, going by the skin and the hair. There are annular indents on the first and second fingers of the right hand, an unusual fashion choice for anyone not wearing the maximum number of enchanted rings in positions that make them hard to remove. Gwen wears hers in the same way. The tattoos don't depict anything recognizable, nor are they symmetrical.

He's also not wearing a shirt, which is why you can see so much of his ink. Why did he go out wearing a cuirass with no shirt underneath?

The looters could've taken the shirt too. Maybe it was a magic shirt. Maybe they thought it was a magic shirt.

It's topologically possible to remove a shirt from beneath a second shirt, but in practice his arms wouldn't bend enough. He's wedged in there too thoroughly.

Hey, you should check on Gwen. She looks like she's not doing so hot right now.

Gwen isn't even facing her. She's kneeling on the ground, hunched over with both hands on the cuirass to examine it.

Oh, you can tell without seeing the face. It's in the way she moves slowly, the way she's slouching while not even standing. A wizard inspecting a relic for traces of magic is in their element. She should be somewhere between 'impassive' and 'happy as a pig in shit', not radiating negativity.

Suddenly developing the ability to pluck secrets from the depths of her own soul, the remains of a dead man, and the vibrations in her partner's aura is the sort of thing that ought to cost a lifetime of memories. Did the headband turn her into a super-empath? How does that even work?