#thread.open

"Poke around," He grumbles to himself, mocking the tone of the poor T&I runner that gave this to him. "See if you can figure it out. It's all. Fucking. Nonsense." The last few words are punctuated by Genma thumping his head down onto the table. "Ugh."

This is why he didn't usually bother with seals. He was the one that found the thing, anyways, even if he supposes his involvement now is a last resort. The parchment smells like ink and vaguely like sundried hay. Genma sighs, picking himself up to squint at the stupid thing again, rubbing the mark of slightly smudged ink off of where it had imprinted on his forehead.

He's just in time to see the flash that engulfs him, sending him toppling to the ground. His voice cracks, dropping an octave instead of his usual yell of surprise.

If I die by this fucking assignment, Ibiki is getting his ass haunted so hard—

Pain lances through where his forehead had come in contact with the seal. It splits and races up to the sides of his head, then down to his ears in an itching, stinging wave of heat. Genma makes a deeply uncomfortable sound as he pants against a weight on his chest and a foreign ache in his lower back as his spine lengthens into a swishing tail. It's over as quickly as it began, leaving Genma panting on the floor of the lab.

He stands on shaky legs, one hand coming up to gingerly tug his bandana off where it's pinching his ears. His center of balance is off ever so slightly, enough that Genma frowns as he looks in the mirrored surface of one of the nearby freezers.

Twin little horns curl up from his bangs. Not like devil horns— these remind him of a sheep. Or a cow. His ears are different, now long and floppy and twitching as he blinks, drooping low on either side of his head. Behind him, a velvety soft tail swishes at the floor. Definitely cow, part of him notes.

Duh, the rest of him hisses back. You've got tits. Decently sized ones, too, having shoved the zipper down on his flak vest to frame his new, well sized endowments, just barely hidden by his undershirt.

In-ho was considering his options at the party, for one he wished to remain far under the attention of the general public and instead take his time surveying important pieces of the delicate chess game. Not to mention with a murderer on the loose, perhaps taking a step back and being uninteresting would mean he would survive another day. He was sipping slowly and gently from something he'd been offered earlier, never really taking more than just a few drops as he moved through the place. Some caught his attention, others caught him off guard, for truly everyone was accepted to join in on the festivities, it was almost jarring to see all layers of society participate in this masked ball. Then again, was not the Venetian way much the same, with people being able to pretend for a day they were something else, something more, something less. To hide behind a mask and pretend something different.

"Did you know that the Venetian Carnival was thought up to grant people the ability to step out of their own lives for a moment? So they could forget about current and future despair," In-ho explained. "It's explained as being on the doorstep of the real-world, a world between life and art, where conventional ideas are broken and new things can life. Grotesque and masks play a big role in it." He said, looking around. "I find it an interesting choice, given the current hardship, to want to play ode to Carnival."

Matevos was making his way through another bottle of champagne snatched under the guise of being one of the servants, he could get away with it since he'd stolen the mask used by the servant and his attire was so dab and dry that nobody would think to look past it. He was constantly smiling and being far too polite to those who gave him more than a second glance, if anyone were to ask him for something from the kitchen, he would gladly pretend to head for it. Easy enough, definitely the type of thing he would get into just because his blood boiled for something to do outside of being amongst people. Also the alcohol made him loose his wits a bit, he would be less inclined to fight every moot point made by bystanders, innocent bystanders, who were unfamiliar with Matevos large collection of useless tidbits.

He spotted someone clearly having a bad time at the party, and walked closer to nudge them with the bottle of champagne. "You look like you could use a drink," he said, deftly pouring the contents in the glass that he was already drinking from - bah hygiene. "They say 1988 was a good year, I wouldn't know." He held the glass out.