Jiorre Othorian was sprawled in the middle of the floor, half clothed in a white, hotel issue bathrobe and blue and black plaid knickers. He had one house slipper on his foot, and the other lay halfway across the room, near part of the broken bed frame.

He might have actually been sort of pretty, if his brains and parts of his skull didn’t lay in pieces across the floor: tanned skin, reddish brown hair, and a fit physique, especially considering he was in his third decade. He had pointed ears and a lace looking tattoo covering his back, in the shape of a pair of wings. He’s Whaigorre. Most likely fae.

That being said, there was, in fact, a lot of blood, and it was everywhere.

I crouched down to examine his body, the carpet squishing under my boots. He’d been hit with a blunt weapon, very very hard. The part of his face that wasn’t all over the floor, near his eye, had crumpled inward. I noted that one of his legs was broken below the knee, the bones pushed out of alignment enough that one of them was sticking through the skin. A bruise had formed on the back of his shin. Tripped him first, then beat his brains out. I stood up and began to walk around the room.

The rest of the room had also taken a beating. The mattress, a thick creation that would’ve taken four people to carry, had been flipped off the bed, the springs poking through the study fabric. The bed frame had been broken into multiple pieces and strewn across the room. Both armchairs were overturned, and the desk in the corner had been broken in half.

The doors to the balcony, like their unfortunate cousin in the hallway leading into the room, had been broken inward, hanging off their hinges. The inner door had actually been broken in half. This time, the person who broke open the doors had actually cracked open part of the frame when they’d hit it. So, they came from the outside… Why can’t this person use doors?

It was then when I noticed the ladder. It was a crude, slapdash sort of thing, hooked over the edge of the balcony. It wasn’t long enough to reach the ground, but it was able to reach the balcony on the floor below. Hm. The perpetrator must’ve gotten up by climbing up to one balcony, moving the ladder and then climbing up to the next… Although, given its shoddy construction, I’m surprised it held their weight…

Unfortunately, the perpetrator hadn’t left any footprints near the ladder or in the balcony, which struck me as odd… I’d have to look a bit more in detail into that later.

I finished my examination of the room in standard form, finding that all of the destruction ravaged upon the furniture had been committed with a blunt weapon (on closer inspection, the same weapon that had broken Jiorre Othorian’s head like an overripe melon), swung with incredible force. Said weapon was nowhere to be found. Most likely disappeared with the perpetrator.

Now that the preliminary inspection was over… here came the fun part.

I took a deep breath… and began to change. The world disappeared for a few moments as my body became a grayish-black whisp vaguely in the shape of someone in standard form, and shrank in on itself, reforming by spreading down and out. Everything became fully visible again, although it looked very different, given I was a few heads shorter than my standard form.

I knew very well what I looked like: a very large black hound, with wavy fur and dark eyes with bright reddish-purple rings around the edges, much like my hair and eyes in standard form, a pointed muzzle, and floppy black ears. I’ve been told that I didn’t look entirely like a physical being sometimes; that my fur seemed to behave a bit more like spectral energy rather than dog fluff.

With my now boosted senses, I began to snuffle around the crime scene. It had been clear before, but it was even more obvious now: there had been a giant here. Or someone who was at least part giant.

The problem with hotel rooms is that that people came and went from them, and left their smells behind. Also, they were cleaned frequently. Most everything I could’ve gleaned from the room was wiped away cleaning supplies, or by other lingering scents.

I sniffed Jiorre Othorian’s hair (or, at least, the part of it that was still attached to his head). He was definitely Faeish, but that was irrelevant… The blood was all his as well. I did find something very interesting things near the bed, but unfortunately those weren’t relevant to the case, either.

I prowled around the room and ended up sitting by the door. Something reaaally smells like giant up there. I rose up on my hind legs, planting my front paws on the side of the door, scrabbling a little for purchase. I was just tall enough to determine that the really strong giant smell was coming from a few hairs that had gotten caught in the broken part of the door. The odor… Giants normally smelled strongly, but this was especially noxious.

I turned back into a person and strolled back in the sitting room, only to find that things had gotten... interesting.