Welcome to Gaia! ::

Angela's breath hissed as she breathed in at the sight of the man's insides, folding back the skin in it's 'Y' cut and clipping it back with clamp tweesers. Imagining how this creature had somehow been so alive before, vivaciously trying to kill them with the utmost enthusiasm, was difficult. How this dried out husk had been moving at all was beyond her understanding. "Jesus H.. " She said, reaching for the rib cutters. If his lower organs were dried out, then what would the chest organs appear like?

"Waddya 'tink happened, eh?"

The blonde glared over her mask at the question and then rolled her eyes dramatically. "Do you think I'd be doing this if I already knew what had happened?" Though the words were slightly muffled by her surgical mask there was no mistaking the tone, a tone which lightened somewhat as her eyes and attention to the task again. "Why don't you ask your girlfriend, she seems to have all the answers so far but she's lacking in the giving category." She was referring, of course, to the other woman; she who had known the language, and some unknown curse that she refused to speak of.

((rolling to cut through ribs.))

Inside, the chest cavity appeared much as the rest of the "man's" innards: hollow, dry, and devoid of any signs of life...like he had never been alive to begin with. Where the heart would be, connected to several blackened veins which ran into the skin before disappearing, there was what looked like a char-black stone. It was slick and cool to the touch, almost like polished onyx. On the face of the stone was a single symbol written in the same forgotten language as the tattoos on the man's skin.

Davis was looking over her shoulder now, apparently abandoning his activities on the social networking site. "It says "Yekula"," he said quietly, no doubt startling Angela. "That was his name."

Angela jumped visibly at the sudden proximity of her partner and his voice in her ear, biting down on her tongue as she swallowed a startled hiccup, and then raised a bloodied, gloved hand to her mouth as she muttered, "Ow..." with a now swollen tongue. Her intention to turn and snap at Davis for being such a sneaky jerk in a morgue (of all places), despite how garbled her words would likely be, when another near-ness stilled her. Stiffening at the sudden closeness of the would-be mysterious stranger, Angela watched her keenely as she took her own scalpel and then cut loose the heart-stone-thing.

Instead of looking intrigued by the chant of pretty words, or interested in the show of involvement in the mystery, she was simply annoyed. "Ah could ah've done tha'" She said, wincing over how her words sounded with an engorged muscle unable to finesse them, and snatched the rock before Davis.. as if to distract herself from thinking how similar she sounded to the annoying lumber jack's own speech.

"Yekula, hmm?" She said, the swelling receding. "Who's that? Doesn't ring a bell." How he happened to know that must have had something to do with the research he'd been doing up to this point in town, something she'd ask about later.

((lol a 1 won't get you much info on any lingering supernatural energies from the stone - no worries, though))

Davis made a face as the two handled the heart-stone. It was a fascinating artifact and perhaps a significant clue in unraveling the mysteries of this town; what this demon was doing shaped like a man and what connection he had to the girl who was watching them all from the shadows cast by the flickering blue light of the old computer screen. The heart-stone was also kind of disgusting. Davis looked away and shucked his hands in his pockets. "Yeah, she's right. Yekula was it's name. There's a lot of power in names, especially True Names. Most folks don't know theirs. Yekula ain't the name his mother gave him, that's for sure. Whoever...whatever performed this ritual on him...found it out somehow. Discerning a True Name...that's power. Rare power." His voice drifted off in a wondering way. "Sleeper in the stars....hmm..."

Taking his hand out of his pocket, he unwrapped a piece of candy and slipped it in his mouth before presenting a fistful of sweets to the gathered group of impromptu investigators. "Jolly Rancher, anyone?"

Keeping his hand extended in case anyone else was interested in sweets, he spoke, still sounding somewhat occupied with another thought. "In any case, we should get moving. There's the matter of this girl...who is she? Someone in town is bound to know her. Finding that out should present us with our next move."

Angela listened intently to Davis' half-iterated words while thumbing the stone lightly, rubbing it with a lover's touch, and her eyes un-focused as his mention of true names and power sunk into her own thoughts. It sounded like mumbo-jumbo to her, entirely too superstitious, but there was something compelling about them too. Perhaps promising even.

Before those Midas thoughts could fully form her attention went to the girl as if she had forgotten her completely, which might have been true. "Oh, right." She said, confirming that possibility. "Can't we keep her? At least until we figure out what they wanted from her or what they might have already done to her?" Insensitivity aside, Angela couldn't help letting her curiosity wander over to the waif. Aside from the writing on the skin, the heart stone was possibly the diamond in the very rough condition of the body and there was a possibility that nothing else would be found from it. There was also the possibility that the girl was safer with them if these things didn't get what they wanted from her the first time.

While she asked she reached for a candy and stopped herself, remembering while the reach was half-way her gloves with dead man's blood on them, and pulled back. She preferred the gum in her sack anyways.