"Sir, Miss Noel Haiba is here. She wishes to look around the scene and offer her assistance for this case." The small lady in the polished suit said in a small voice as she approached her superior, the chief detective. Almost immediately, her eyes went wide as the man in front of her screamed threw a file right at her. Thank god she dodged in time. He was shaking as small growls escaped his chest.
"Noel Haiba that brat...What does she want now!?!?" He screamed once again as his arms flew around him, almost comically. Everyone around him was alarmed and on guard, some scared and some questioning his sanity.
"Calm down, Bart, I only wish to look around and see if you've actually done your job right for once, you old coot." A woman in a trench coat, no more than 25 in a bucket hat walked in and spoke with a lazy voice, as if the tantrum didn't bother her in the least bit. Noel Haiba - one of the most intelligent women one can come across. Strong, independent but heavily asocial and arrogant. A true Sherlock Holmes reincarnate. She looked around the room and at the corpse that laid lifeless in front of her as the smell of blood, fresh linen sheets and cheap perfume filled her nostrils. The man looked at her as his eyes went wide.
"Get out! We don't need your assistance, this is clearly a suicide!" He said in a feral tone that would scare anyone else.
"No. You're wrong, as always. It was murder. Quite obvious, actually. I see years of detective school did literally nothing." Noel spoke up matter of factly.
With a boat load of misplaced confidence, the chief threw her a smirk, his smug look infuriating in its own right. "Do you have any evidence for that, child?" He expected her to stutter and make up an excuse as to why she thought so, and boy was he ready to humiliate her in the room filled with investigators.
What he didn't expect was for her to challenge his smirk as she looked at him.
"Well, the GSW is on the left side of his head. This man was right handed and there was no gunshot reside found on either of his hands or anywhere else on his body. Neither is there any account of ambidexterity in his history, which means that in order to shoot himself, he must have twisted a lot, which given his age and stature would not have been able to make such a clean, straight through wound on his head."
At this, the chief huffed a puff of air and glared daggers at the woman in front of him, clearly irked at her observations. Noticing the change in his expression, Noel's smirk deepened as she continued with her explanation.
"He has a ring on his left ring finger. He's married, and the piece is well maintained. Polished regularly and clean inside out. His other jewellery is dirty in comparison. He gave importance to this ring. He also has a tan line on his finger, so he must have rarely removed it. He was dedicated to this marriage. So, tell me chief, why does a happily married man end up dead in a hotel room that smells of cheap women's perfume at 2am in the morning?"
The chief looked more like a red balloon ready to burst at any given moment as realisation dawned on him and everyone else in the room. This was, in fact murder.
"Cohen! Contact his wife and question her, I want to know why he came to this hotel, if not for an affair." He yelled to his subordinate as he looked to Noel once again. The woman just shrugged and walked past him, ready to find more clues on the case.
As she exited the room and walked into the hallway, she spotted a flash of long blonde hair.
'A woman, huh...that's strange, this floor is supposed to be on lockdown. No one should be able to enter...Unless of course! They never left the floor! That's our perp! It has to be...every other guest on this floor was accounted for.'
Noel bolted at this thought, hastily trying to catch the person that fled. She turned the corner into the stairway that was barricaded. And like that, she came face to face with a woman, covered in blood, looking frantic.
"So we finally meet, huh? I'll be honest, it wasn't very smart of you to stage this as a suicide. Who kills themselves in the middle of an affair, let alone in the nude? This is kind of disappointing from an intellectual standpoint but a criminal is a criminal. You will be punished for this" The detective spoke up as she lunged forward to attack the other woman.
BANG!!
There was loud noise that echoed in the small stairway. Noel looked down at her abdomen at the sharp pain that suddenly struck her. Her pristine white shirt was now covered in blood as she coughed some up. She used what little energy she had to look up at the perpetrator, eyes wide as she saw her holding a gun, a smile playing on her lips.
"You knew i murdered a man, and hence have a gun, yet you so boldly jumped at me? That wasn't very smart of you." she mocked as she started laughing maniacally, slowly turning her back to walk away.
Noel fell to the ground, mind thoughtless as she awaited her end, everything else a blur. She could hear people screaming her name, felt a pressure on her body as she wished if, one last time, she could reach out. Her eyes slowly closed as her body went limp, slowly growing cold.
*HUUUUGHHH* *GASP*
'huh? where am I? what is this? I was shot...How am I alive!?'
She looked around frantically, trying to make sense of her surroundings. A dingy dark alleyway, covered with moss and mould. She raised her hands and-
'WHAT THE HELL!?!? WHY ARE MY HANDS SO TINY!?' she internally screamed as she felt herself up.
'This looks like a child's body' she realised as she got up to walk around. She made her way out of the alley and was floored by what she saw.
'Carriages? Horses? These clothes... WHAT IS THIS, 1738??' she ridiculed as she searched around. She found a store and as she walked towards it, she saw her reflection in the glass.
'Wow, this really is the body of a child. Was I reborn or something. No way, how would that even work.....'
*A few long moments of thought later*
'I'VE TRANSMIGRATED TO ANOTHER WORLD!'
Name: Noel Haiba
Age: 10
Status: alive
Family: none; orphan
Intelligence: 100/10
Job: swindler
Yes, you read that right. A child with an IQ of 193. Endless possibilities and zero suspicion.
'Man, the lack of technology here makes it really easy to get away with anything. One life as a detective and another as a swindler, huh...sounds like something straight out of a novel lol.' she wondered as she walked away from a wealthy looking man she had just tricked into giving her money.
As Noel walked the streets of her new land, counting her wealth, she spotted something. A family. A happy one. A mother, father and their child, all happily skipping through town without a care in the world. Aristocrats too.
'Happiness plus wealth...now that's platinum luck' she thought as she felt her heart clench ever so slightly at the sight.
'This poor child. I wonder what happened to her parents. Am i dishonouring her image by being a swindler? But i have to survive. I refuse to die again.' as this internal dilemma plagued her mind, Noel continued walking on the streets of Ophelium, her new home, with doubt for the future.
'Will i be able to live a good life here?'