• Who are you?
   ⤷ "Dinner"
• What are you?
   ⤷ female Opparan harbor seal, aquatic mesopredator and mother
• How was your blood shed?
   ⤷ impaled without warning by a sharp object at the base of the skull while swimming just below the surface
• When was your blood shed?
   ⤷ one cycle of the moon has passed

She reads the page carefully, then looks at the corpse. Then back at the page. Then back at the corpse.

"I don't think your spell worked, Gwen."

"See, it says here the blood came from a female, but this is clearly a man. Oh, wait, I guess she could be—"

"It was a ruse," she says coldly. "A smokescreen, a Fog Cloud, a waste of our time. The murderer anticipated Blood Biography and saturated the crime scene with animal blood. You were right – whoever we're dealing with, they're familiar with the magic at our disposal."

"You haven't even heard my cross-gender seal wizard theories yet! One, wizard polymorphs female Opparan harbor seal into male Taldane human. Two, Opparan harbor seal is herself a wizard—"

"No. Just, no. You can't Permanently turn anything into a human, not without Grand Polymorph, and even then it would have to be roughly the same size as the target human form."

"Adult Opparan harbor seals can weigh between two hundred and three hundred pounds. I don't know how much this guy weighs, but you could get a seal the same size as him if you hunted patiently. Might have to be a juvenile."

There you go again, making assumptions about wizards. Get over your complex, coppa.

What about an Awakened Opparan harbor seal switching to druids probably goes against the spirit of the injunction.

"Can you cut him open and get a blood sample for Blood Biography that way?"

"Yes, but it'd be redundant. We can ID the body by asking around, but if I draw the blood myself the spell will point back at me instead of towards the killer."

She also only had the one copy on the scroll, and while Blood Biography is in her spellbook she doesn't have it prepared.

"If the killer knew to pour animal blood everywhere then they probably stymied Speak with Dead as well. Divination is a bust – mostly a bust, the blood was spilled a month ago so the seal plan might have been premeditated. Let's put a pin in that for now and move on. Next thing we need to do is investigate this church… somehow. I don't see a way in."

"Neither do I, but it's one of Aroden's churches," Gwen says thoughtfully. "If it's anything like the ones back in Absalom, it'll have a big glass skylight over the nave. We can potentially get in that way."

"Aren't there a bunch of ascended humans? What makes you think this joint belonged to one of 'em in particular?"

"Not just a human, but the god of humanity. I don't recognize all of these statues, but that one is definitely an icon of Iomedae and the one right next to it is probably supposed to be Arazni. The skylight would be for stargazing, which explains why they built it all the way out here."

The statues are literally faceless, so she must be going by the religious styling. The first statue has two empty scabbards on its belt and a chalice held in both hands, and the second is armed with a weird sword and wears an enormous pointy crown. Both very distinctive – it's unlikely Gwen has them mistaken.

She's just going to pretend those names mean something to her.

"Great, so we have an ingress. Thank you Aroden. Now all we need to do is free climb fifty feet up a cliff. Are you ready to climb, or are you going to fly while I hump my way up there on my own?"

"Don't be silly – Fly is a third-circle spell, and as you already know I can do more with less. Madari-jamura!"

Gwen proceeds to climb up the exterior of the Church of Humanity in under twenty seconds. The way she moves only bears a passing resemblance to actual rock climbing, her hands only touching the rock to steady her ascent and prevent her from drifting off into the void. She passes the kid already on the wall with neither of them so much as acknowledging the other, and when she reaches the top she stops in midair and looks straight down expectantly.

"No one likes a showoff!"

She backs away into the center of the plateau, examining the cracks and whorls and unintentional pockmarks carved into the surface of the wall with the considering eye of someone who has absolutely no idea what she's doing.

It's a damaged building, not a 5.15 burnished deathtrap. Look at the ledge the grafitero is hanging from – there's a clear route to his position, and from there you can shimmy up the gable to the top of the cliff.

That's going to be very comforting when she's forty feet off the ground, dangling from one hand off a ledge the width of a blade of grass as she wipes sweat off the other. By that point all of her clothes will be soaked, so the sweat won't even come off. This is just asking for trouble.

Yesssss, use your anxious feelings, girl. Let the fear flow through you! Why do you even need to go up with her? Let Gwen handle it on her own; go look for a ladder or a staircase in the meantime.

Great, now she has to do it.

She grabs a pinch of the fine dirt resting in the gaps between the paving stones, dusts her hands vigorously, and approaches the wall. The rock radiates a pleasant solar heat, and when she drags her fingers over the surface there's a reassuring amount of friction. The nearest handhold is temptingly close.

Climb away.

… I want to be in someone else's head. Someone who cares about their own wellbeing. Is that too much to ask for?

It's a surprisingly simple task, at least to begin with. There are toeholds spaced closely enough that she can do the bulk of the lifting with her legs, reserving her arms for leverage and stability as she scuttles left and right across the cliff in search of easier passage.

Her face is less than a handspan away from the rock, near enough to make out the delicate writing inscribed directly onto the Church of Humanity. Is any of it worth reading?