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Phoenix has been rather quiet since he woke up in the medical wing. He wants to think everything that happened was just some horrible nightmare, but as he overhears more and more conversations, it quickly dawns on him that it is impossible to say this is the case.

A week... If I'm right, I've been gone a whole week. Trapped in that thing...

Is it true? Was there some sort of false me running around? Is that why I see so many people looking at me with contempt when they pass? What exactly did my imposter do? And... why would they pick me, of all people? I'm new. I'm nobody. It doesn't make any sense.

I told Edgeworth I'd do everything I can to help... but in the end, I just helped create more hassle. Am I really supposed to be here?

He clutches the magatama in his hand as if all sense of his reality depends on his holding it.

((ooc: Phoenix's insecurities has a side effect: any attempts to lie to him right now will manifest psyche-locks, from one for a barely kept secret to five for a deeply guarded one. Carpe diem, as they say.))

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"Nope! You're the one used to checking places out! Maybe you'll see what I miss or something."

So, once Phoenix is healed up and on his feet, he gets a message from Sonic telling him to meet him at a certain hallway in a certain building. Once he gets there he'll find that yes, it's the same building he got rescued in.

"Hey buddy! You feeling good enough? Then let's do this!"

It won't take long for him to lead Phoenix to the hidden room. Hopefully it hadn't been disturbed too much since it was found.

Phoenix, lacking his suit, is currently wearing something more casual, a fairly simple pullover shirt, with jeans and tennis shoes. (No hoody, sorry folks.) "As good as I can hope for, I guess," he replies. He's been feeling pretty stressed for a while ever since that Hazama... guy told him about what his clone did. Hopefully, if he can help a little, that will make him feel better, at least.

The whole room makes him feel uneasy, though. Even if he can't remember that well his experiences in it, remembering what little he does -- vague images of attacking chains, and a woman ready to blow his head off thinking he was some sort of traitor, not to mention the tube itself -- haunts the room with an unsettling presence.

"Let's just do this as fast as possible, okay?" he says, wrapping his arms around himself.

"Think about who you're talking to!" He says with a smirk. "Fast is what I'm all about!"

As though to demonstrate, he zips through the room and over the heap of bookshelf, rustling papers with the breeze he stirs up.

"Okay..." He whistles, looking up at the stacks from inside the hidden room. "There's... more in here then I remember there being... where do we start?"

He looks at the various stacks. "Er... start from the top and work our way down, I guess," he replies sheepishly.

Most of the surface books seem to be account records, using the BCE/CE calendar system - some dating back a few hundred years - but a good eye can tell these have been moved recently.

Sonic is on top of a ladder waaaaay up in the air, leaning against the stands of books and eyeing one that he turns over in his hands with a bored expression, his ears half-folded back.

"Nothing but weird ledgers and stuff. All in all, not very interesting..."

Phoenix frowns a bit. "Don't be too sure." He points. "Look. The age of these things indicates they should have been here for a long time, but there's hardly any dust. These have been moved recently." He crosses his arms. "The question, then, is WHY they've been moved." He begins to shift a few. "Come on. I bet there's more to this."

As Phoenix moves some books - the topics get more interesting. Books on various cloning techniques from different worlds, various poison catalogs, and demonology books.

"Whoa..." Sonic turns a book on cloning over in his hands, cracking it open. The whole thing made his quills want to stand on end. "Looks like we've found the knowledge base for their whole operation in here!"

He starts to rifle thorugh the books with more interest. "Maybe we can tell what OTHER little projects Aenathia's group is working on, if we look at these books closely enough."

He frowns. He's not entirely sure he wants to read through these; the guilt over his clone makes the entire library unsettling. But Sonic has a point. If they can look through this stuff and find anything that might indicate future plans, that would definitely help everybody.

"All right. Let's see what we can find." It's only a tiny voice in the back of his mind right now that ponders the surreality of him looking through tomes on cloning and demons when he was still finding spirit channeling so amazing just a month ago. Finding out you had an evil clone does that to you.

The cloning books were extensively, and had quite a few notes written in the margins, discussing the benefits and drawbacks of each method described, there's multiple handwriting types - small, tight print, elegant lightly-pressed cursive and crisp, dark right-slanting print, suggesting the books had been passed along in a way that mean the conspirators weren't meeting each other face to face.

The poisons were marked by worlds, and it seems Dark Arcanum actually came from Councilor Thomas' world, a strange coincidence or someone's sick joke.

"Dark Arcanum..." Sonic mutters, having moved from one book to the other in his skimming. "Seems pretty low that they have to resort to poisons to get things done. But with this, we've got an idea of the kinda stuff they can use."

"Poison is completely unforgivable," says Phoenix, almost automatically, and there's an undercurrent to his voice as he says this.

He stands up. "If that's all we can find, we should take these books to an Enforcer or a Councilor. They can look through them with probably better understanding than we ever could." He looks. "Let's make one last sweep before we do that, though"

"Take it EASY, Phoenix. Sure, let's give the place one last once-over before we get outta here."

And he does. Sonic's own special brand of hyperactivity causes him to look over more than just the books this time around. Like the shelves they're on, any knicknacks or manuscripts that are sitting out, maps on the walls... even the very tops of the shelves and the stone floor beneith them.

This means that Phoenix is going to find him climbing a lot of things... in fact it might look like the Hedgehog's just goofing off, now.

Sonic may find old and interesting knick-knacks in his searching, and non-relevant files such as Senior Councilor food preferences, and a list of import/export bans at the Market which at one point included Happy Fun Balls.

While Phoenix would note that the demonology book had a few pages torn out.

Phoenix grits his teeth, but tries to comply with Sonic's request. It doesn't really change his opinion on the situation, though.

As he flits through the book one last time, the ripped pages only now just occur to him. He runs a finger along one of the ripped edges. "Uh... is it probably a bad sign if somebody apparently decided some of the pages in a book about demons are worth keeping independent of the book?" he asks.

"...Huh. I didn't know Tribbles were banned from the marketplace. Guess it sorta makes sense... huh?" He muses from his seat on top of a bookshelf, sneakered feet kicking. He leans over to look down at Phoenix.

"It's missing a couple of pages? D'ya have any idea what they were supposed to be about?" He means in context to the surrounding pages, of course.

Unfortunately no, each ritual and demon blurb only covers five pages max - it's a book that believes in being concise.

"No such luck. Spiffy." He grumbles. "Well, maybe there's more than one copy and we can compare it. Either way, I think we're pretty much done here. Did you find anything? Er, besides Tribble bans."

"I think that's it up here." He reports, hopping down and landing on his feet. "So we've got the poison handbook, the clone book, and that thing on demons..." He gathers up the other two busily.

"You remember who's doing Siggy's interrogation? Something tells me they'd be the ones to go to with these."

"Afraid not," Phoenix sighs. "I guess we should find out about that. Let's get out of here. This place gives me the creeps."

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