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Incongruous with the decapitated body strewn across the bed, the room had been left reasonably tidy.
With close to six years of piracy under his belt, Shachi had witnessed a good share of all the various eccentricities the Grand Line had to offer, both sublime and grotesque alike. A naive part of him would have liked to have thought that very few things, no matter how fantastical, harbored the capability of fazing him - a belief which had been shattered the moment he'd had the misfortune of setting foot on this graphic scene.
Ironic, wasn't it, given the gross banality of the carnage he currently beheld. After all, no matter how uncouth it might sound to admit it aloud, that was exactly what this was, right? Banal. Cliche. Because as he stood there in that dingy motel room at roughly three in the morning, still somewhat sluggish from sleep-deprivation despite the ungodly amounts of cheap caffeine buzzing through his system, the only thing Shachi could ascertain was how utterly repetitive this whole situation seemed.
The scene felt universal down to every last lurid detail, characterized by flamboyant imagery that could have been plagiarized directly off of the crime section of last week's newspapers. There it all was. The intrigue, dead information broker, the missing murder weapon, the horde of hysterical crones screaming their heads off from the banisters (heh, there was always at least one on scene for these sorts of crimes); there, the rumpled bed sheets, the blackened spots of blood clotting over the walls, the taint of human refuse curdling the air...
Shachi hid a grimace.
Well. Maybe it was cynical of him to dub this as entirely trite.
Poor bastard's head was missing, after all.
"Looks like he traveled light," a cheerful voice declared from his right. "Nothing to see here other than some clothes and spare change. I checked the papers he had on him, too. No sign that he was aware of being pursued..."
Muffling a yawn with the back of his hand, Shachi turned in time to see his crewmate Penguin hold up an empty bag upside down and give it a decisive shake. Since their arrival, he'd engrossed himself with several menial tasks unprompted; searching the dead man's belongings just so happened to be the latest one. To any idle bystander, his behavior could be construed to be erratic – even unseemly given the circumstances – but Shachi understood. Back from when they were kids, carefree Penguin had always had this knack for assuming a frighteningly convincing guise of normalcy whenever they got into a scrape. Whether it be via a lighthearted quip or a harmless distraction, that was just his own roundabout way of making sense of difficult situations. This time was no different. Shachi was just secretly surprised that their captain hadn't objected to the meddling.
Then again, it wasn't as if they had much to worry about when it came to dealing with authorities at this particular township. As was typical for settlements forged haphazardly beyond the outskirts of civilized society, Torlo Island was infamous for its lawlessness. It had originally been developed as a mining district by some ambitious corporate conglomerate from the South Blue. The project had gone aground years ago, however, leaving behind a patchwork of unsupervised ghost towns which eventually burgeoned into regular breeding dens for both criminals and aimless drifters alike. Given its unaffiliated status with the World Government, Marines avoided the place like a plague.
