"Dead Men Tell No Tales" And Other Lies: A Guide To Coroner

[FeiH]

NSS CYBERIAD
CORONER'S GUIDE
Damien Parser, Coroner
FORM NSS-CYB-MDB-MRG-000451
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I. INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the Cyberiad. I hope the hyperspace jump was pleasant enough - you'll get used to it soon enough, unless you like spending most of your time sleeping in cramped cryopods with life support so closely tied to the powernet of a space station whose engines are held together by duct tape and prayers.

NanoTrasen says that they hire the best of the best, which you should already know isn't the case when you watched that security officer beat a clown for slipping him. Nevertheless your credentials are colorful and impressive, and you've chosen - or been chosen - to join the Medical crew as a Coroner. Let me be the first and last to congratulate you on this incredible feat. Your job now gives you the honor, the privilege, of examining;

• gaping stab wounds;
• horrible festering corpses;
• people so mangled you don't even know what species they were;
• people missing most of their organs;
• things that used to be people.
• and more. so much more.

I hope you have a strong stomach, or no stomach at all. Either works.

 

II. YOUR JOB, YOUR TOOLS, YOUR WORKPLACE

Your job is straightforward. 

1. take the corpses of crew and perform an autopsy to determine the cause of death;
2. compile your findings in a report;
3. if necessary, forward a copy to security to assist in ongoing investigations.

Take a look around your office. Get used to the scent of metal and stale, filtered air. If the shift goes on long enough you'll bet that the stench of death and decay will swiftly fill the room. Now, turn your attention to your immediate surroundings. We will be splitting your office into three zones: Clerical, Examination, and Morgue.

Clerical - where you're supposed to do your paperwork. I normally do it right next to the body for ease of access, but you can do whatever.

1. Medical Records Console - though it looks like a laptop, some joker decided to screw it to the desk so nobody steals it. On this computer you can conveniently change anyone's medical records from Active to Deceased, which changes their appearance on the manifest. Since people die and come back quickly almost nobody ever bothers to update these records. However, I find it immensely useful for updating the status of executed EoC if only to make the manifest that much cleaner to look at.
   Do not, under any circumstances, delete ANYONE's medical records without permission from the CMO. Unless you need to make a body unidentifiable...
2. Boxes of Bodybags - Aside from the box that you're given when you sign up, you have two more boxes of bodybags waiting for you on your desk. These convenient little things can store bodies and anything on turf just by closing on it. It can actually store a lot, including all of a corpse's belongings should you decide to completely strip it for whatever reason. You can label these bad boys with a standard issue pen, which is great if you want people to know that this person was already revived.
3. Paper, Filing Cabinets, Copier - Very important, for evident reasons. Your job is paperwork. These things work with paper. This is how you do your job. If you need me to give you a lesson on writing on pieces of paper, god help you.
4. Request Console - The shut-in enabler. A good coroner delivers her reports to the brig for analysis. An efficient coroner will print out a label bound for the HOS's office and mail them the reports. Simply print out a label and stuff your effects in the box, seal it, and toss it in the disposals bin. Make sure to use the request console to send a message to the HOS's office notifying him that you sent your report.

Examination - This is where you'll do all the dirty work. Though admittedly, with advances in the scanner's technology you won't have to do much cutting anymore. This area, directly south of your desk, contains the following notable items;

1. Surgery Table - It's a surgery table but without the console. You'll be placing dead bodies on this so they don't get their festering juices all over the floor. The light is located above which can be really inconvenient when scanning people; I've accidentally hit the light multiple times.
2. Coroner's Closet - Unlike the stuck-up snobs working with the meat, your closet has no lock. Keep this open so you can access the things on the left table. Inside you'll find a lot of useless crap but the real treasure is...
3. Formaldehyde - This magical thing keeps bodies from rotting, which lets you work on them longer and also keeps them from husking if you somehow neglected to clone them. The provided dropper is a good tool for applying it, and as little as 1u of Formaldehyde can keep a body in stasis. Admire the gaping hole where his face once was. Examine the gore. Go wild, sicko. I usually take these out of the closet and place them to the left.
4. Camera - a camera, good for taking photographs of corpses. Has marginally less use considering that the lightbulb likes to obscure whatever you're trying to photograph, but it can be useful to take a photo of a stiff if they're Unknown.
5. Scalpel & Autopsy Scanner - once upon a time these two worked in tandem. Now you don't really need the scalpel. The scanner is all you'll need - point at a corpse's body parts and click on it in your hand to print a handy dandy autopsy report. The scalpel can be used as a weapon if you need to, but you won't need it if you're a good boy and stay in your office like you're supposed to.

Morgue - Where you store all the dead bodies. The morgue tray lights indicate the status of whatever's inside;

• Red - There's no ghost here. They're either alive or the ghost departed. Don't clone.
• Green - There's a ghost in here, you moron! Clone him! It also could mean that someone's alive in there.
• Orange - There's random crap in here, like an empty bodybag. Clear it out before it becomes an issue.
• Purple - The spirit's out on a little stroll, or they're uncloneable. It just means that a spirit is present but not in the body.

 

III. WHAT TO DO WITH A DEAD BODY

The meat of the issue.

Someone's being cloned and the body was dropped off in your office, either in a bag or just on the floor like the sack of skin and nails and hair that it is. Here's a quick guide on what to do with it;

1. EXAMINE THE CORPSE
   Why? Simply put; if it's a suicide, it's not worth your time. You can tell when someone suicided through the examine text - you can safely skip the autopsy unless you want to be thorough. Then take their ID and any job-specific gear. Disposals mail the ID to the HOP's office, set their record to deceased, and disposals mail whatever it is they had to their department. If it's too big, like a hardsuit, take it off them and yell at their department head to pick it up at the morgue. Then drag their body to either the chapel to have it incinerated, or to the chef to feed to the crew. I'm sure mister Todd would love to have some new meat in his kitchen.
2. MAKE SURE IT'S DEAD
   Stick it in an empty morgue tray. If the light's Purple or Green, drag it back to the cloner and yell at whoever put a cloneable body inside your morgue. Unless they're an EoC, then you're free to stick your hands all over their body while the ghost watches, horrified.
3. SCAN IT FOR INJURIES
   Drag it to the exam room next to your office; nobody ever uses that anyway, so having a possibly rotting body in there shouldn't hurt anyone (at least until infections are coded in). Put it in the body scanner and print the report out - you now have a record of all its injuries, the types, and where it is. This will make the paperwork much, much easier.
4. PERFORM THE AUTOPSY
   Using the information gathered from the full-body scan, now it's time to perform the autopsy. Just take your handheld scanner on Help intent, and change your target to whatever body parts were injured. There we go, Autopsy Performed, mission accomplished. Print that sucker out and now all you have to do is the paperwork.
5. WRITE YOUR REPORT
   We'll cover this in the next section; it's important to write the report as soon as you finish scanning so that the information stays relevant in the face of an ongoing investigation. When you're done, scan it, store a copy, and send the other copy to security.
6. STORE THE BODY
   After all the dirty work is done, zip the body in a bag and shove them in a tray for posterity. You'll never know when you'll need their corpse again.
    

 

IV. THE PAPERWORK

If you're lazy, here's the paperwork template I use. You can stop reading here if this is all you wanted. I highly recommend buying a laptop with a NanoPrinter, as it will let you edit and copy reports conveniently without having to wrestle with papercode fields too much.

Spoiler

[center][logo]
[b]NSS CYBERIAD MEDICAL DEPARTMENT
[large]CORONER'S REPORT FORM[/large][/b]
[small][i][field], Coroner[/i]
Form NSS-CBR-MDB-MRG-0312[/center]
[hr]
[b]NAME[/b]: [field]
[b]OCCUPATION[/b]: [field]
[b]TIME OF DEATH[/b]: [field]

[b]STATUS (CLONED, BORGED, DNC)[/b]:

[b]SUMMARY OF INJURIES[/b]: [field]
[b]CAUSE OF DEATH[/b]: [field]

[b]NARRATIVE[/b]: [field]

[hr]
[center][i]Glory to NanoTrasen.[/i][/center]

 

Every good autopsy report is made of at least three components;

1. The Full Body Scanner Report - from the body scanner, shows the initial areas of injury and the time of the scan.
2. The Autopsy Scanner Report - shows the times that the injuries were inflicted, the exact time of death, and the source of the injury.
3. The Autopsy Report - the thing that people will read to figure out what the hell all the other things mean. 

The report is essential. A good report means less people asking you pointless questions and more time for you to work on other bodies. It's also the most fun part of the job, since now you get to play mini-detective and figure out the cause of death. It's important to note the time of death, as injuries can and will be inflicted after death. These should be mentioned but specifically that it was past the point of death, to rule it out as the cause. It should look like this;

Time of death: When the person died.
Affected Areas: Where the injury was detected.
Time of Injury: When the damage was caused.
Weapon: the source of the injury. This will also include low pressure, low body temperature, burning, high body temperature, etc.

I can't teach you how to identify a cause of death. This is where your imagination and knowledge of game mechanics come in handy. Do note that a person's health does not stop at 0 - at 0 HP they fall into crit, where they'll steadily suffer from suffocation damage as their lungs and heart stop working. At -100 damage, they die and become a ghost. Take the suffocation damage into account as it can help IMMENSELY when trying to identify murders. Even the damage sources will provide necessary nuance and background into a victim's demise. Here are a few examples;

Accidental Death by Exposure: Suffocation damage paired with low body temperature and low pressure damage. The poor fool most likely stepped into space and died from lack of an exosuit and internals. 

Accidental Death by Depressurization: Aside from the suffocation and pressure damage, they might have brute damage from random objects slamming into them at high velocity while being sucked out into space. This isn't usually present unless fastmos is on. It's also possible that they were hit by objects they threw in order to guide them onto station.

Murder by Exposure to Vacuum: You can easily tell this is the case if, in addition to the above damage types, they suffered brute damage beforehand or have broken bones. This is where the time of death comes in handy, because if their time of death is sooner than when they recieved the pressure damage then that means the murderer spaced them AFTER killing them.

 

V. CLOSING REMARKS

I hope that this guide comes in handy for your corpse-examining escapades. 

I actually don't know how to end this, so I'll leave a large blank area below for personal notes. I'll probably highlight any changes if and when I decide to edit this guide.

Damien Parser

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"Glory to NanoTrasen."

&^?!!&^@!

!&@^&!. ERROR_NULL_ENTRY

so it's come to this.

I knew you were different. There was something about you. Something subversive. Something dangerous.
The following is read only. Do not under any circumstances expose the contents of this message.

Here are some tips for the traitor in you.

Clear the medical records of your target. People forget that you have a medical records console in your office. It would be a shame if they had no idea who they were treating should they disappear off the medical records; you could easily frame them as a traitor who used a DNA scrambler.

Clear your medical records. If you gain access to a command-level medical records console you can purge your blood and print data from the system, making your murders all the more covert.

Make sure your target stays dead. It's as easy as adding a "DO NOT CLONE" tag to their bodybag. If you're a changeling, it's even more fun - steal their DNA, transform into them, and claim that you were cloned. This only works once, however, since you'll wind up losing your morgue access. leave this as a last resort if you have a kill and replace objective. If you need to steal a brain, just ask cargo for a surgery kit and say you want to practice on dead bodies - after all, nobody will miss a few cloned corpses, will they?

Lie on your autopsy reports. Let's face it. You're probably the only one who knows how these things work. Traitor coroner is like traitor detective, except you have no security comms or a fancy gun.

Use your medbay access. Swipe the syringe gun and fill a needle full of ether. Carry formaldehyde with you, and a bodybag. After committing your heinous crime, bag them and tag them as if you're bringing them to the medbay to be cloned - then do whatever you want with them. If you have chapel access, incinerating your target while alive but unconscious is a deliciously sadistic way of ensuring they never come back.

Be thorough. You're the only coroner on the station. If they find fibres of a coroner's getup on you, then your life is forfeit. The syndicate has no need for failures.

Death to NanoTrasen. Long live the Syndicate.

Edited September 7, 2017 by FeiH

[Streaky Haddock]

you nerd. (nice guide tho)

[ZN23X]

I've tried to make my own custom coroner report by looking at real coroner reports and I like yours more.

[CPTCoffee]

This is really nice. Thanks. 

[Streaky Haddock]

Other notes to add: 

Data is lost if limbs are missing. So try to reattach the head and limbs for a full picture, if you can.

Unknown bodies can be identified by operating computers without fail. If you don't know the changeling victim, or they've rotted to hell, stick them on a surgical table next to an operating computer and it'll identify them for you.

Tell the difference between bodies husked by fire and bodies husked by changelings by sticking a syringe in them and attempting to draw a blood sample. No blood, then it's a changeling!

Data is also lost if the body is skeletonised. I know flesh-based attaks such as unarmed claw attacks are lost in this manner. So always preserve your bodies.

If Cargo has their conveyor going, you can print shipping labels to send IDs + PDAs to the HoP. Only one item at a time, so it's best to insert the ID into the PDA first.

Man cloning if your morgue is empty. That way you can ensure there's enough biomass, and accurately record corpses as cloned. Offer backups to your colleagues!

If there's a revenant or head-slug around, get rid of as many corpses as you can afford. There may be some purple lights you want to keep hold of, but it's up to you to prevent them from gaining power/a new body.