Item Seed: The Iquique Mount.

The Iquique Mount

Description: A fairly gruesome-looking taxidermy full body mount.  The mount itself is humanoid (not even remotely coincidentally resembling a ‘Grey Alien’) in form, with well-preserved skin and glass eyes; the manikin is polyurethane foam over a not-particularly-accurate internal armature.  The Iquique Mount is affixed to a wooden base, with the date “July 18th, 1980” inscribed on it. There is no obvious sign of any sort of fatal wound.

This charming artifact was discovered six months ago in an estate sale in Iquique, Chile.  The owner was a wealthy ‘businessman’ with unsavory habits and even more unsavory business associates; his death was violent and sudden, but in a reasonably explicable way that probably has no bearing on the current situation.  The investigation team was much more concerned about making sure the Iquique Mount was quietly acquired before it could prove to be too much of a sensation. And for good reason.

The problem here is that we know who the Iquique Mount actually is: it — he — was one ‘Coconut Badminton,’ and yes, the name sounds absurd.  It’s also the closest we can come to saying his real name. Anyway, Mr. Coconut was a fairly prominent journalist among the Greys who disappeared, indeed, about forty years ago: it was quite the scandal when he vanished, but nobody ever looked for him on-planet because he wasn’t supposed to even be in this sector of space.  Earth is still listed as being hands-off due to our reputation of being half-primitive savages (a reputation admittedly not being helped by our apparent stuffing and mounting of an alien journalist), and Mr. Coconut certainly didn’t have the permits needed to visit.  So the discovery of his corpse is proving to be a rather embarrassing scandal, all the way up and down the chain.

Which is good!  Scandals are easier to resolve when everybody’s got skin in the game — ah, sorry about that.  The point is, find out who killed Mr. Coconut, preferably why, and work out a proper form of retribution.  You’ll be getting some Grey backup, too: this is Shellack Copulation. We’ve been told that Inspector Shellack is one of the Greys’ finest police investigators; you are to give her every cooperation.

What?  Ah, the trenchcoat and hat.  The Inspector has informed us that this is part of her Earth disguise, and that it will undoubtedly fool the, ah, ‘locals.’  We suspect that there may be a translation issue. Just sort it all out, all right?