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Characters: Skulduggery Pleasant and YOU (but specific starters for Captain Amelia, fellow turtle-parents Hawke and Akito, and Monet)
Date: Catch-all for April before the bombings and console crash events
Location: Throughout Keeliai
Situation: Various! These will include futzing with unused consoles, discovering the turtle baby, and also intercepting kedan informants. But Skulduggery’s going to be all over the Shell throughout the month, so feel free to chime in with your own.
Warnings/Rating: None for the moment. Well, there’s some lock-picking.

I usually start with prose, but I’ll adapt to any style. If you want a specific starter, PM me at

Amaraq!

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Amelia was not sure what she would do with herself today. Perhaps a visit to the markets, or to check on Taraja. Whatever it was, it would be out and about.

Of course, only a few steps out from her door and she spotted a familiar figure that seemed to be paying too much attention to the door of her (she had presumed) empty neighboring suite. That would do, she decided. Amelia had been meaning to meet again with the skeleton man, as they had gotten off on quite a good foot. So she changed directions and called out to the other.

"Skulduggery, I wasn't aware we shared a building," she remarked, coming up alongside him. Pausing, she looked at what he was doing, her lips drawing into a thin line. "This is your suite, is it not?" Of course it wasn't, he wouldn't be picking the lock if it were. She folded her arms and gave the skeleton a questioning and slightly disapproving look.

"Hm?" Skulduggery glanced up, the momentary distraction causing him to drop the cheap lock pick. He let the equally momentary frustration slide by and smiled at the captain, a fact evident in his voice, if not quite his face. "I'm picking something up for a friend. Unfortunately, he forgot to leave me the keys."

If he tried hard enough, he could even claim that was the truth.

Amelia stooped down and picked the lock pick up, giving it a look over. "Really now?" she mused, still apparently focused on the lock pick. "Well, I'm afraid your 'friend' has given you a false address. That suite is unoccupied." Now she met Skulduggery's eyes - well, sockets, really, - wearing an expression that made it quite clear she was expecting that he would be willing to explain himself. Truthfully.

She made no move to return the pick; it would be her leverage.

She didn't have to return the lock pick. Skulduggery could have easily taken it back with a little air manipulation that the captain likely wouldn't even see coming. In most cases, he would have.

Right now, however, Skulduggery decided it was a much better idea to be polite, and let her keep it. He raised his hands in surrender. "Alright. You got me. I'm committing a crime. May I have my lock pick back, please?"

The pick remained firmly grasped in her hand. "So I gathered, by your picking of the lock. What possible interest could a skeleton detective have in an empty suite?" There was no hostility in her tone; rather an underlying amusement. His not quite telling the full story was something she had anticipated after their first conversation.

She was also genuinely curious about his motives. Skulduggery had a suite of his own, so any robbery of vacant ones did not make sense.

"The empty suite must not be empty," Skulduggery replied with a shrug of his shoulders. "None of them are, from what I've gathered. They're all fully furnished, ready for the arrival of more Foreigners. Don't you find that interesting? I wonder who's in charge."

It was only tangentially related to what Skulduggery was actually trying to do, but it was something the detective was curious about. He'd have to look into that, when he had the time.

"I suspect you'll have to ask the kedan about that, as I rather doubt Evandau's in direct charge of our housing. Otherwise, it's not terribly surprising. We Foreigners arrive rather helter skelter here, and it's much easier to have rooms already available and ready for us." She palmed the pick and stepped past Skulduggery, arms folded behind her back. "What I find more interesting is your interest in an empty suite that is, to put it in your own words, not empty."

She would find out. That was simply how things worked for her.

"Well," said Skulduggery, "because it's not empty." He thought he'd made that part clear. "Please don't make me knock the door down."

He was sorely tempted to, now that he thought about it. If the kedan prepared these suites, furniture and all, without anyone noticing, then why couldn't they also fix a door? His only concern would be getting caught, and for Skulduggery, that practically wasn't a concern at all.

But they also weren't alone on the street.

He sighed. "I'll make you a deal. Come inside and see for yourself, so long as you don't then report me to any authorities."

Amelia appeared to consider this for moment. "Well, I must say, you've certainly aroused my curiosity now. I suppose I'll take you up on that offer." She drew the pick back out, but instead of handing it over held it a second longer. "So long as it isn't too illegal."

She didn't think it would wind up being anything bad, though. Empty suite and all. And with that, she finally tossed the lock pick back to Skulduggery.

"The kedan," said Skulduggery, "have laws against whistling on Sundays. If they frown on what I'm about to try doing, I honestly don't care."

He'd read up on the legal systems in Keeliai the first chance he got. Or tried to; three or four books were enough to tell him the kedan were a very strange group of creatures and trying to learn what they considered worthy of a fine was only going to be a waste of time.

Skulduggery caught the lock pick with one hand and reinserted it into the lock. A moment later, that lock clicked, and the door opened. "Thank you."

The suite, with one glance, followed the same basic layout as Skulduggery's own. That was enough to bring him right to where the console was in the living room, and with a swipe of the screen he turned it on. Skulduggery ignored the blinking cursor asking for a password and instead knelt down to look for any kind of a control panel.

Amelia followed the skeleton into the suite. It was similar to her own, as she arrived into it; true, she'd taken the time to perform some rearrangements, but the idea was the same. While Skulduggery made a bee-line to the console, she approached a table, swiping a finger along the top. No dust; the suite was clearly well-maintained in the absence of a tenant.

She turned back to Skulduggery, curiosity still quite high. He had turned the console on, but was now crouched beside it, apparently investigating the system itself. Amelia moved over to watch; her knowledge of the workings of the consoles was very limited, after all, and she wouldn't mind herself seeing how they looked internally.

There was a control panel, as it turned out. It was held in by what looked like screws. Rather than get up and look for some form of screwdriver that he probably wouldn't find, Skulduggery worked the air behind the panel to slowly pry it off the column of the console.

He glanced up when Amelia moved over, which was evident only in the slight tilt of his skull. As the air he was manipulating finally started to catch, Skulduggery belatedly realised that a warning was probably in order. "You might want to stay back. I've been told that - "

The panel came off. Half of the console came off with it. The hole Skulduggery made exploded with a viscous black liquid that coated the entire front of his suit before he managed to get to his feet and leap away, and the rest of the console very quickly followed it, melting into a bubbling pile of very ominous-looking black goo.

"Well," Skulduggery managed after a moment while the bubbling continued, "that it would do that."

One did not reach the rank of captain without being able to react to situations with speed, and despite her dislike of comparisons being drawn Amelia did indeed possess certain, dare it be said, cat-like reflexes. So, light of that, when Skulduggery's very brief warning came, she was able to spring back un-slimed when the console, for lack of a better description, exploded into a gooey, bubbling mess. Well, that also had to do with the fact that Skulduggery himself took most of the machine's spray.

For a moment the only noise in the suite was the sound of the bubbling remnants of what had once been a communication terminal, until the skeleton man belatedly finished his warning. For her part, Amelia simply stared in stunned silence at the mess - what manner of defense mechanism was that? - until her eyes moved over to her hapless companion's condition.

A few seconds longer of mere bubbling still, then, in a voice clearly holding back laughter at the man's plight, she responded, "You look a right mess."

"I'm sure I do," Skulduggery agreed. There was a certain note of lament in his tone. The suit he was wearing was the only one he had, and now it was dripping with black goo. Unless he could find some equivalent of a dry cleaner's in the city, he no longer had anything to wear.

Well, not until the kedan seamstress he'd met finished his order. But even then, none of the new ones would be Bespoke-tailored. None of them would be bullet-proof, or weather-proof, or fit quite as snugly as Ghastly's suits always seemed to manage.

Skulduggery allowed himself a few more moments of pointless self-pity, and then he knelt down to inspect the goo more closely. It wasn't oil, that much was certain. It wasn't any sort of chemical or fluid he'd ever seen before, in fact. "You don't happen to recognise this, Amelia, do you?"

"Cheer up, I'm sure it'll come out." Amelia moved back closer to the mess to inspect it, now that the immediate danger of being covered in goo had passed. But on closer inspection, her face set into a frown.

"Unfortunately, I have seen something similar before, and it was far from benign." The slime was eerily reminiscent of the corruption that had afflicted Han, back in the bottle world of Kithika, and her experience there guided her to keep her distance, lest this bile also create monstrosities to fight.

And if it was the same, then Skulduggery needed to know. "I'd step back from it, if I were you. If this... liquid is the same as what I've encountered before, we'll have a bit of a scuffle on our hands in a moment's time."

"In my experience," said Skulduggery flatly, "no, it doesn't."

Not without so many parts of the suit being replaced that he might as well have ordered a new one to begin with.

Fortunately, Skulduggery's attention was caught less than a moment later. "A scuffle?" He didn't get up, and instead peered closer at the voluminous black goo. "Did the liquid itself attack you?"

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