Anna's face turned pale white as she looked at the seeping body splayed out on the table.

"What the fuck," she managed, covering her mouth and staggering backwards. Her eyes swept desperately over the room and she stumbled over to a nearby bucket, vomiting most of a breakfast burrito's worth of half-digested remains into the nondescript metal bucket.

"That," Eleanor said, biting of the ends of the words with acidic precision, "was an organ bucket." The formaldehyde solution which held John Doe's kidneys, every bit as chocked with black goo as the rest of him, sizzled a popped as it came into contact with whatever eldritch abomination had recently resided in Anna's stomach.

Gracefully wiping her mouth with the sleeve of her jacket, Anna shrugged as she straightened back up, "Well, I don't think he was planning on using his organs again any time soon."

"Is it supposed to do that?" She asked pointing at the sizzling contents of the bucket as she tried to regain some clarity and focus. 

"Well," Eleanor began closing her eyes in an act of herculean restraint, "I had our resident alchemist the formaldehyde with a magic suppressant solution." Eleanor peeled of first one glove and then the other with a wet snap before tossing them into a biohazard bin.

"Which means either there are traces of magical material in your stomach acid or you just ate a bunch of pop rocks. I honestly don't have enough data to know which is more likely." Off to the side, Junia looked faintly green.  Of course, she usually looked faintly green, so this wasn't useful information.  She backed away from the hissing bucket.

"Um, Anna, where did you get that burrito from?"  Junia asked.  "I think selling magical chorizo should at least earn them a negative Yelp review."

"The only thing magical about that chorizo was how good it tasted," Anna replied, still mourning the breakfast burrito.

"I...may have ingested some alchemical compounds as part of a new research project last night though," Anna admitted.  Eleanor began to fold her arms across her chest only to realize that she still wore her gore spattered apron. Aborting the motion she instead put her hands on her hips. There was a slight tingle in the back of her sinuses that indicated that she wasn't managing to control her magic quite as well as she thought she was. One of the fluorescent lights overhead flickered in sympathy.

"I'm sure you gained many 'new insights' Anna," Eleanor replied caustically.  The lights flared up for a moment and one of them popped with an electric sizzle and then went dark.

"Now if you wouldn't mind sharing your no doubt vast insight into alchemical substances with us..." she made a gesture towards the black goo, "I'm sure we shall all be better pleased." Junia jumped when one of the lightbulbs popped.  Irritated Eleanor and electronics don't mix, and there was lots of sensitive electronics in the rooms.  Best to change the subject.

"So I'm not clear... was the guy submerged in this black goop, or is he becoming the black goop?" Junia asked with a sidways glance at the corpse. Eleanor's gaze shifted away from Anna to the matronly scholar, her professional interest slowly displacing her irritation with Anna's continuing foibles. 

"Well, interestingly it seem that neither is the case. Judging from a cross section of his distal phalanges it seems he has been ... interpenetrated by the... whatever it is. He did drown, because a layer of it destroyed the areola of the lungs, but he would have gone down to generalized organ failure within an hour at most." Eleanor made a vague gesture towards photographs on the wall.

"It seems pretty inert, whatever it its, its not a toxin or a pathogen that I can determine."

"Well, that's good.  Because you're soaking in it," the librarian pointed out judiciously before turning to study the photographs.
  
"Interpenetration?  That sounds complicated.  That sounds like magic gone wrong.  Like maybe he was trying to conjure this stuff, but the spell went haywire.  But no, because you said this guy is not a magic-user."

"Is this another case of someone 'dabbling in things men weren't meant to know'? So poor normie picked up the wrong book and read the latin out loud?"

Eleanor considered it. One of the positive effects of the near pathological secrecy which practitioners of the arcane attached to their craft was that it was a rare thing that a regular man or woman off the street could pick up a codex or a scroll and do themselves any harm. There were exceptions of course. Some practitioners, especially those who fused faith with magic, could be positively evangelical in their texts. Fortunately the aforementioned paranoids tended to shut such movements down with extreme prejudice.

"Its possible, hard to say without any background and without..." she shot a pointed look towards Anna, "any idea what this stuff is."

Bowing dramatically for Eleanor and then Junia, Anna picked up a random stick looking instrument from the nearby medical stand, and approached the unfortunately inky corpse.

Prodding the corpse and then the black goo carefully, the alchemist took a deep breath, seemingly struggling against the urge of vomit again.

"The disgusting things you make me do," Anna muttered as she leaned in closer, her nostrils flaring slightly as she wafted air above the black goo towards her.

"Esteemed colleagues," the young alchemist began, spooning a bit of the black goo into a vial she seemed to palm from her sleeve.

"What you see before you is ink, black ink to be precise," Anna began, before laughing, as if there was some funny joke that the others had missed, "Someone is playing a joke on you boss, it's old, very old, 1700s maybe, hard to tell exactly, but it's quite the vintage."

"It may be plant based or at the very least it smells faintly of tree sap," Anna concluded, popping a cork stopper into the vial she held. "Beyond that, I would need some more time to investigate the properties of this ink." 

"Ink?!" both Julia and Eleanor interjcted in tones so similar they might have come from twin sisters.

"I've heard of writers who say they bleed ink, but this is a bit too much," Julia observed, peering closely at the vial.

Eleanor shared Julia puzzlement. There was a flicker of relief on her face when Anna mentioned the likely plant origin of the stuff. Squid and other creatures of the deep could produce great quantities of ink also and Eleanor was VERY pleased to be able to rule that out.

"Old fashioned ink is made from gum of arabica, kind of a tree sap," Julia piped in helpfully.

"Wait ... could that really be what happened?  Could someone have actually turned his blood into ink?  That's like ..."
Junia paused and frowned.  "That would be difficult in Classical magic," she said, referring to the sort of Late Platonic magic she was familiar with. "I can't say impossible - I have no idea where to start - but I think it could be done.  Changing animal blood into vegtable ink sounds like something more ... nature magic-y, maybe."

Eleanor tapped her finger to her lip contemplatively. Her mood seemed to be improving as she considered the arcane puzzle.

"It isn't just blood, the ink is in the intraosseous spaces, too, and the lymphphatic system. I haven't done an analysis yet but given that he presumably traveled from somewhere to the site of his death I guess it wasn't able to infilitrate the cytosol, at least not completely." Her gaze turned to Anna and cooled a degree.

"It might be possible to use a combination of alchemy and thaumaturgy to do it, but it would be an extremely difficult working, which begs the question why? There are much easier ways to kill someone, even if you do want to make a point."

"The manner in which a victim is killed can be reveal much about the killer," Anna said channeling something she suspected she had heard on a Crime podcast that she had only half listened too while mixing some concoction.

"Perhaps our killer simply wanted to send a particular ink stained message?" she mused with a shrug. "That or some murderous practitioner of esoteric magic wanted to flex with their mad alchemical skills. Which knowing wannabe witches and wizards is always a possibility."