Case 5: Teal Murder
BARISTA: THE AUDITOR
CAFE: NONE
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: ATD-01
I am currently en route to Requiem once again. It has been four months since my last visit. When I was last there, the Requiem team was still investigating Ms. Sandiego's presence on (or under, I suppose) the lake, and were conducting some information gathering from locals. They learned that Behram's ghosts (Ursula's ghosts? I'm not quite sure who has "custody" as it were…) had been ferrying illicit goods to Ms. Sandiego via Mr. Fenimore. This critical connection was made in part thanks to Mrs. Montferrat.
Mrs. Montferrat is now dead.
I know, I know—Mrs. Montferrat was already well on her way to an early grave with how many Double Shots she would drink. In fact, she had been known to split a sandwich with Behram on occasion and that alone could be seen as a type of death. Undeath? I'm not here to split hairs about those who partake in Behram's contractually binding cuisine. Besides, this is not like that. No. This is nothing at all like that. Mrs. Montferrat is dead, and she died behind a Teal Door.
Teal Doors, to put it mildly, are not a common cause of death even within the Coffee Trade. To be put behind a Teal Door, to die in a Teal Room—that is death of the highest order. That is a death of body, mind, and soul. A complete and total death. Removal. It is outlawed in all circles of the Coffee Trade. Even the Astorians abhor it and that is saying something. Of course, they abhor it perhaps because they cannot control it. Again, Teal Doors are not a common cause of death. Of the people who could orchestrate such a death, there are very, very few. And two of those few just so happen to work at the Cafe and Diner: Requiem. Requiem who investigated Mrs. Montferrat just a few months ago. Requiem who has an employee who was taken advantage of by Mrs. Montferrat.
This had better not be what it looks like.
BARISTA: PENELOPE CHARBONNEAU
CAFE: REQUIEM
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: CD-ATD-02
It is a rare and beautiful day when the Universe corrects an error such as that bloodsucker Germain so… thoroughly. The news that the parasite of Royal Street had been trapped behind a Teal Door, consigned to absolute bitter nothingness, did admittedly bring a warmth to my chest that no amount of homonymous liquor could match. The Auditor did not share my relief. I suppose they saw a violation of protocol where I saw a tab finally being paid in full. They stormed into Requiem accusing everyone with a pulse. I merely sat back and watched. It is not often one gets a front-row seat to the aftermath of a perfect execution.
Though, to be clear, I had nothing to do with this.
And neither did Liz. She stuck his pale pathetic ass behind an Amber Door, and that was more than good enough for me.
BARISTA: ELIZABETH LEWIS
CAFE: REQUIEM
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: C-ATD-03
So, I suppose the Auditor wants me to write up a sort of... "incident report," well, fine. Here you go. I will do my best to write about an incident which occurred without any of my knowledge or involvement.
The vile vampire St. Germain of Royal Street was murdered... at the hands of... some unknown entity capable of conjuring Teal Rooms. In case I need to be exceptionally thorough in my write up… "Teal Rooms" are one of the infinite varieties of Prismatically Altered Spaces of which I can conjure. Though, to be clear, I am hardly the only person capable of creating such altered spaces—and furthermore I have never even created a Teal Room. Except… well… there was that one time, way back in December 2019 to contain… er… well, "eradicate…"
You know what? That doesn't matter.
Even then it was wrong for me to use the power of a Teal Room because a Teal Room is not death, it is the essence of "Void." It removes whatever is within it from the Universe. Not kills, not destroys, not overwrites, VOIDS. Deletes entirely. And I shouldn't have to explain that it's not like I have a "delete" button for people I find annoying. To suggest I would waste the sheer, exhausting metaphysical effort required to manifest a Teal Room on a third-rate bloodsucker like St. Germain is honestly very insulting. I put him in an Amber Room. It was stable, it was secure, and most importantly, it was reversible.
To shift a space from Amber to Teal requires a transition through White Light, a moment of vulnerability where the subject would have been briefly, well, active again. Have we even considered that St. Germain might still be alive? What if he is working with this other entity who could conjure Teal Rooms at will? What then? And, to be frank, we all still clearly remember St. Germain and that's not how a Teal Room is supposed to work. If St. Germain was truly trapped in the Teal we wouldn't have to suffer his name any longer.
BARISTA: THE AUDITOR
CAFE: NONE
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: DD-ATD-04
I can't believe Jack is pulling me off of this case! And to send Sahir in to do it… You know, I don't have to Audit the Cafe and Diner Network if Jack is only going to have me be some sort of… lackey. Well, I already set up a Diner Diner password last week, so I might as well put it to some use on my trip back to California. I was intending to write about Color Rooms regardless as I feel they are a little understood piece of the cosmology of our Universe and I had already gathered notes on them in preparation for this investigation.
Color Rooms, sometimes referred to as Color Doors, are—as I understand them—spaces of filtered Universal law. In our Universe, everything is washed in what is referred to by some esoterics as "White Light." A harmonious blend of all cosmic laws, mundane and magical. Gravity, time, space, speed, cause and effect and so on, all operate in a unified field of "White Light." You could also call White Light, Universal Order or perhaps even Universal Truth. But it is helpful to think of this concept as Light because, like light, certain "prisms" can focus and separate this Light into distinct and segmented colors. As it concerns Color Rooms, these specific Colors are then absolutes of singular bands of Universal Truth.
The most famous of these is, of course, Teal Rooms. Teal Rooms are spaces that have been filtered to be only Void. Null. Emptiness. Anything in a Teal Room, thus, is not. It no longer is. It is death beyond death, it is removal of the highest order. Amber Rooms are filtered to remove all except the present moment. Eleleth most often creates these rooms as they are, to my estimate, fairly benign. It was in an Amber Room she last left St. Germain. Other known colors include: Indigo (perception), Vermillion (acceleration), and Ivory (tabula rasa). Theoretically, there are endless colors possible, but, realistically, most are too arcane or otherwise specific to be of any practical use.
As for how these filters work, there are a few hard rules that I have been able to determine. First, the effect of a prismatic filter is binary. It either is or it isn't. There is no fading into a Teal Room, there is only Teal Rooms and otherwise White Light. These filters also only extend to enclosed spaces. There is no tangible threat of the entire Universe being suddenly flipped into Teal Light. Second, there seems to be an Observer effect in play, at least with manmade Color Rooms. Felix's Teal Door in his childhood manor can only shift its interior to Teal if no one is watching. If the door is shut. And lastly, there is a Conservation of Color… you can't have one room inside another. You can't have a Teal Room expand from within an Amber Room.
Which… does indicate that someone, possibly Eleleth… possibly someone else, had to first free St. Germain back into White Light before ultimately sealing his fate into the Teal.
BARISTA: FELIX BLACKWOOD
CAFE: REQUIEM
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: CD-ATD-05
The Auditor is quite the frantic creature, always scurrying after the "how" and the "who." They look at a Teal Room and see a crime scene whereas I look at it and see just another abomination. You see, the creation of a Color Room by a mortal hand is not a feat of architecture, nor even standard sorcery. Speaking from personal experience, it is an act of supreme theft and little else. In our green youth, my brother and I did not "learn" to fold the White Light. I may be quite the magician but I am no Archon. Instead, we reached into the pockets of Papa Legba and snatched a handful of the raw, prismatic shards that lay at the crossroads. We were rather arrogant, no? We wanted to build a door that led to Nowhere, believing that if we controlled an entrance to the Void, we would be the masters of the All and None. Masters over the terrible Terminus that haunts the core of the Otherside.
We succeeded, in a way. We fashioned the Teal Door within Blackwood Manor, but we did not create a room of permanent stable Teal. We built a transition, a hinge between Being and Non-Being. When the door is closed, the room beyond is merely a dusty parlor. But should the latch turn with the right... intent, shall we call it, the transition itself becomes the destination of eternal deletion. Anything caught in the threshold when the Light filters from White to Teal is not crushed or killed; it simply ceases to have ever been a part of the conversation. It was this theft of Papa Legba's power that turned the Blackwood House to taboo among the Old Voodoo Houses of New Orleans.
The Auditor suspects me because I have the blood of thieves on my hands and they suspect Elizabeth because she need not steal to harbor such frightful power. But, I fear, the Auditor misunderstands the nature of the sin of Destruction, or, is it Creation? Regardless, the alleged victim is St. Germain, no? Funny we still utter his name—as if this was all but a ruse. A set up. Believe me, St. Germain is likely dead, but he is far from "voided." What an interesting game is beginning to unfold… Could it be the Wicked's Eidolon? Or is this a more Vile crime? Or… perhaps something much… greater.
BARISTA: ICHABOD RAMSES
CAFE: REQUIEM
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: C-TBR-14
Tonton Felix is a man of heavy secrets. Lord knows he shares only a fraction of what he truly knows. And if he thinks this Teal business is a trick, a bit of trompe-l’œil I would not be one to argue against him. From what he wrote of his… regrettable business… at the crossroads, I got the sense he knows who is behind this but also that St. Germain is dead but not, eh, "deleted" as it were. Those who die by the Teal are removed. Forgotten. Replaced. But St. Germain is still very much here, both historically and in our present thoughts.
That’s where the Black Roux comes in.
I cooked up a fresh batch of the Black Roux in the coffin-nail skillet for madmwazèl Wade to consume. We know now that the Black Roux works as theorized, Katherine needs only to consume it to hear the thoughts of the dead. Of course this would be a meaningless venture if St. Germain had been fully removed from this world, the next, and far beyond. But, he is likely only dead. And death is a suggestion at best, especially for the followers of the Dark Lord Behemoth. If the Void is as absolute as Tonton Felix claims, there shouldn’t be a single whisper left for Katherine to catch. No lingering regrets, no last words, just a hole in the air where a vampire used to be.
So, eat up, chérie. We're going to push this little experiment of ours to new heights. I am actually rather curious if we will find out if a Teal Door truly wipes the slate clean. If Katherine tastes nothing but cold iron and ash, then St. Germain is truly gone beyond death, vanished into the Great Null of Terminus and deeper on. But if she catches even a hint of his lingering thoughts, a flash of Royal Street or the bitter tang of his last fears preserved in the Amber Room Elizabeth left him in… then this wasn't a Teal Room at all. It was all but a masquerade.
BARISTA: KATHERINE WADE
CAFE: REQUIEM
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: C-TBR-15
The Black Roux is always so heavy. Choking, almost. I guess it is mostly dirt, ash, bone, and fat. Ichabod was worried there would be nothing but silence. He kept saying that if it was a Teal Room, St. Germain would be "voided," and there wouldn't be any thoughts left for me to find. But as soon as the Black Roux touched my tongue, believe me, the silence broke. St. Germain isn't gone. I was still able to hear and even see his death-thoughts, and they were screaming, just for a second, before they settled into something much, much colder.
I saw it, or I felt it, through his eyes. It wasn’t a Teal Room. That was a lie, a setup, created afterward. St. Germain was trapped in the Amber, suspended in that soft, golden "now," when a hand reached in and pulled the color away. I… I don't know who it was. It was a man in a flat cap. I couldn't see his face clearly, but his voice was like gravel grinding together. He sounded... tired. So, so tired. But at the same time his voice was intoxicating. I wanted to hear more… I still want to hear more. But… It was only a memory, and not even my own. He said, "Germain. Sorry to do this, old friend—but the boss, he wants you out of the picture, you've said too much." And then the world didn't just go empty. It burned.
It wasn't a Teal fire.
It started as these strange yellow flames with a core as black as coal, flickering and hungry. Then, the man did something, a twist of the wrist, a shift in the air, and the yellow bled away into a deep, rich blue. It wasn't the flat, hollow nothingness of Teal. It was… vibrant.
It was... Azure.
The color rang in my head like a bell, loud and sharp and terrifying. Everything melted into that Azure.
BARISTA: THE AUDITOR
CAFE: NONE
DATE: EARLY DECEMBER
RECEIPT ID: CAD-07
I pulled some of Requiem's other cases for this report because, well, I didn't exactly have time to do a thorough job, did I? Don't Despair, Case No. 5 is still in my top 5 of 5, even as far as Case No. 04 is concerned. At least Ichabod and Katherine's latest experimental recipe tied in well enough, don't you think? And the evidence they uncovered is rather striking. Wouldn't it be nice to stay and sort out this mystery before being dragged back to home base for… what? The new "artist" in a flat cap? Or is there some other pressing matter Jack needs me for? If he pulled me merely to berate me, I might have to give up this whole Auditing business then and there. I've been around for far too long to worry about playing by some imaginary rules Jack pulls out of his ass on the spot.
I am getting ahead of myself, aren't I? I should at least wait to see what Jack wants before I get too far in my own head about what might be more important than some Teals, Ambers, and, I suppose, "Azures." What do you think an Azure Room does? Kills, possibly. Azure is not that far off from Teal, all things considered. Ah, but then do the "colors" actually mean anything or are they arbitrary to us lowly employees of the Coffee Trade? A problem for Requiem to sort out in my absence.
If anything Requiem could call upon the aid of Midnight, as they are roughly in the area due to the Mangrove Syndicate's growing sphere of influence. Jericho's mistress might know. Ah—I should probably compile my October cases regarding that matter as well. But, God only knows if I'll have the time for that depending on what work Jack throws at me. I wonder… could there be a connection between the Syndicate and what lurks beneath the lake? Or is it all connected by the same singular thread of the terrifying, terminal Nil?