"At least twelve," Calvin agreed. He could tell by the way the body moved — or rather, hadn't — when it had been levitated in. Levitation spells didn't support weight evenly; they buoyed up a central area. Corpses that were very new flopped when they were moved. Corpses that were very old did the same. There was a space in the middle, between an hour and a day, where they went stiff as boards. (People tended to bring him more of the very old corpses than the very new ones — there was always some to-do with getting them out of the place where they'd died and down to the morgue. Most of his very-new-corpse experience had actually come from the hospital, where he had watched people die on occasion. The corpses that had passed into the once-more-flopping area were also usually suffering some degree of decomposition — when they shifted in midair it occasionally made the people bringing them in lose their lunch).

"Probably less than a day, but that's assuming there weren't preservation spells in play," he continued. He knew a handful of them, and there were some worked in to the magic of the morgue tables themselves. Bodies rarely arrived having been already-preserved, but bodies also rarely appeared by themselves in hospital rooms in the state this one was in, so he couldn't rule anything out. He had been looking at the body again, keen to get started on the puzzle it presented, but now he glanced back up at her and seemed to realize for the first time that she wasn't one of the regulars.

"There's paperwork on the desk," he said, with a nod towards a desk on the far side of the room. It was perfunctory; nothing about the tidy rolls of parchment stacked on the edge or the chair positioned perfectly squarely behind it or the clean ink blotter resting next to the stoppered ink suggested it had been used recently. "For you to release the body. You can write unknown for... most of it."

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