Opening complete, time for pieces to be taken…
Chapter 10: Morning of Tragedy
Battler wakes up to an alarm at 7am, so he’s running on about 4 hours of sleep right now. The curtains are drawn. He turns on the light, and sure enough…
Heavy noise filters!
As we knew to expect from the prologue, the other four people in the room are dead: George, Jessica, Maria and Rosa, who is in the room too. The character screen updates, as we saw earlier.
On the wall is the Seventh Pentacle of the Sun. So we’re keeping up the occult theme…
Erika butts in. She’s… not in the least bit perturbed by the murders.
Erika: ………Good morning, everyone. ………Oh, ……what a wonderful magic circle.
Indeed, she’s greatly entertained. She’s ready to step into her role as the detective. Battler tells her to fuck off, and she implicitly accuses him of being the culprit. But of course, the family aren’t having this random stranger butting into a murder scene. So… Erika drops red text on the game board level, wait, is that allowed?
Erika: Detective’s authority. ……The detective has the right to investigate all crime scenes. Move out of the way, Ushiromiya Battler. This is my legitimate right within the game, as granted to the human side.
Apparently using red down here in the game board serves as a kind of incantation, which forces Battler backwards. Really screwing with the integrity of the scenario…
On the player level, Bernkastel repeats the line:
Bernkastel: Because I am the detective.
Battler is not allowed to argue this by the rules. The narration highlights how weird it is for everyone to be telling everything to Erika “for some reason”.
Bernie gets to it. She observes that there must be two more corpses somewhere else to qualify as a proper First Twilight. She makes fun of Lambda’s shitty magic circle:
Bernkastel: Your Hebrew sure is crappy, Lambda. You’ve got this part slightly wrong.
On the magic layer, Mammon, Asmodeus and Satan appear as well. They conclude that someone must be trying to imitate Beatrice’s methods, and decide to go report it to her. So as far as this board’s fiction is concerned, Beato is not the culprit in the magic narrative. But then, what is the witch illusion here?
Meanwhile in the kitchen, Gohda and Sayo are preparing food, blissfully unaware. They’re getting on for once! Ah, an aside from Sayo comments on this: she likes Gohda pretty well when he’s cooking, and she generally feels that if his only duty was preparing food, everything would be better.
Kumasawa is there too. Kanon arrives. Nobody knows where Genji is… They assume he’s sleeping, and dispatch Kanon and Kumasawa to go wake him up. Kanon fell asleep in the servant room, so didn’t see Genji that night.
At Genji’s room they find a piece of tape attached. It’s perforated so as to tear if the door opens. So this is an anti-tamper seal, I guess Erika must have placed it?
Looks like ‘E. Furudo’ on the first line, and maybe something like ‘Franchesca Bernkastel’ on the second? Is that Bernie’s first name?
Of course, Genji has been killed too! Beelzebub, Belphegor and Leviathan observe this on the magic layer. They’re equally surprised, and rush off to search the mansion.
Lucifer is guarding Natsuhi in her room. She assures Natsuhi that nobody tried to enter. She’s about to report some bad news, but Natsuhi picks up the phone first. It’s Phone Man again. She assures him she has not left the room. He answers by revealing that he’s kidnapped Krauss! With Krauss as his hostage, he extracts two promises from Natsuhi: to play dumb about where Krauss is, and to hide in the guest room closet at 1pm for one hour.
We cut to Lambda, doing her voice, this time without the phone filter. How are we to interpret this? Is there nobody on the game board who’s playing the role of ‘Phone Man’? That seems against the spirit of the scenario. Is Krauss actually kidnapped? Could he be dead? In Chapter 1, the five we’ve seen so far plus Hideyoshi were dead. Since Hideyoshi was alive when the cousin’s bodies were found, it’s possible there’s a first-twilight death we don’t know about yet. Krauss, maybe.
Incidentally, we already have a death screen for Genji, so it can’t be ‘only when Erika investigates’ or anything like that.
Bernkastel steps up to play. She confirms with Lambda that we are in a closed circle with no outside communication, so the detective’s authority can’t be overridden by the police.
The survivors are all gathered in the parlour. Erika’s detective bedside-manner is, uh, horrifc lmao
I find this interesting because ‘yeah, yeah, get on with it’ is kind of the attitude the player starts to get after a lot of discovering-the-bodies scenes, and now that attitude is being sent into the game world where it’s incredibly crass.
Kyrie notices that we’re one short of the epitaph ritual, clued in by the magic circle. Eva accuses her, and Erika who makes the same observation, of being the killer—indeed, she seems to be the only one who can’t see the pattern. Meanwhile Erika takes an opportunity to drop her catchphrase…
What is it with fictional detectives and catchphrases, anyway? I guess it can all be blamed on Sherlock Holmes.
The question of Kinzo comes up. Of course, nobody has managed to contact him (and Gohda isn’t in on the deception.) Natsuhi deflects by dashing off to check Krauss’s room. As she follows, Erika observes that in ‘third-rate’ mystery and splatter films, people who run off on their own die first, but the opposite is true in action and disaster movies.
We cut to the game board layer… where Beatrice has appeared! Wait, what? Apparently Piece!Beatrice can come up here as well? Hmm, well, no actually, though it uses the purple tea room background, it might still be ‘within the game board’. Are we going to have to draw a chart to keep track of all this?
Gaap seems to be aware of the red declaration that there is no 19th person. And piece!Beatrice seems to have figured out that the game board is now in the hands of Lambda and Bernie.
She doesn’t seem to mind so much, at least it’s not boring. Her goal is still to keep ‘Kinzo is dead’ a secret. And moreover, to protect Natsuhi from getting framed as the culprit.
Meanwhile, Lambda reports in summary that Krauss’s bedroom was found empty, but with big bloodstains. I guess this keeps open the possibility that he’s alive for Natsuhi…
We get a BG for Krauss’s bedroom, for the first time I think! It’s huge.
I found the version in the game files, but it has transparent windows, so instead have this screenshot with Eva standing in it.
Krauss’s character screen is updated, going grey instead of red… I think I must have missed this in chapter 1.
- Ushiromiya Krauss
-
Went missing from his room on the second floor of the mansion. There were large amounts of blood on the bed, making the situation bear a strong resemblance to those of the other victims.
He is the only victim of the first twilight whose body was never found.
Krauss’s room is not locked, which Kanon confirms is odd. They start counting locks, but Erika interjects, saying that since Genji was killed, his master key is unaccounted for and could have been used anywhere. She’s rather disappointed that this rules out locked rooms.
Natsuhi dashes to the guest house, hoping to still cover for Kinzo’s death for some reason. I feel like that ship has rather sailed… at this point, covering up embezzlement is the least of Krauss’s worries…
Erika whines that Natsuhi seeing Jessica’s face will not advance the story, but Lambda interjects, saying Beato’s pieces have intervened. It turns out they’ve removed the bodies from the guest house… a mystery, since it seemed the entire surviving cast were moving around in a big herd.
Bernkastel hypothesises that they weren’t actually dead. Another possibility is that Krauss is the culprit, and move them, right? Anyway, here’s our blue:
Bernkastel: “Here’s the first one I can think of. The victims aren’t actually dead. They pretended to be dead, then secretly hid themselves somewhere. After all, you haven’t declared anyone’s death with the red truth.
Lambda says she won’t use the red truth until the end of the game. Here’s the second, which is what I thought.
Bernkastel: Krauss carried the bodies off and hid them. You’re making it look like you’ve kidnapped Krauss and locked him up somewhere, but he might actually be free. Krauss has no alibi. Krauss hid their corpses.
The third one gets a bit sillier: it’s the ‘fake corpse’ trick:
Bernkastel: The corpses were different people in the first place. They were substitute corpses made to look like the victims. George and the others were hiding from the beginning, and later cleared away the substitute corpses. The corpses were dead from the very beginning, so they don’t count towards the number of people on the island.
Lambda finds this hilarious. She says she only needs to smash one of these, and the rest will be ‘swallowed up by darkness’, leaving no truth at all. I don’t think that’s how it works..? Indeed, Bernie observes that Lambda must overcume all three ‘blue wedges’. (Hey, aren’t red wedges more fun?)
Bernie goes on a little soliloquy about how witches need multiple ‘stakes’, or a full clip of bullets, to be killed. This was just a skirmish, but she’s having fun…
We see Gaap hiding Genji’s body, accompanied by Mammon, Asmodeus and Satan. She frets about what sort of being Lambda has summoned to do all these precise kills. By moving these bodies off the board, she says she moves them to a state of ‘missing’, catbox’d into both potential perpetrator or potential victim.
In her mysterious purple war room, Beatrice compares the situation to the Records of the Three Kingdoms, with the three sides switching allegiances. Ronove makes the reference more specific: the Longzhong Plan of Zhuge Liang, everybody’s fave character. (Hey, who here’s seen Paripi Kōmei?) So, does that mean Beato’s in the role of Liu Bei..? Ronove points out that all three kingdoms were ultimately destroyed, with the Jin taking over… Beato makes a connection between the Sima clan, who were invited as advisors by Cao Cao but ultimately took over, with Lambdadelta…
The clock advances to 8:04am and the chapter ends! The next chapter is called Ten Wedges to Pierce Witches.
OK, we’re off to the races!
Bernie’s theories seem pretty good, but let’s see if we can predict some moves ahead. What’s Lambda’s overall strategy? She doesn’t seem to be inclined to mess around with setting up locked rooms. For that matter, is Team Beatrice part of Lambda’s strategy, or are they really a third faction as Beato supposes? Once again, we have to wonder how independent the pieces are from their players.
Anyway, assuming Lambda confirms the deaths and identification of the bodies, and also says it wasn’t Krauss, what else could have happened here? Natsuhi kept running off ahead of everyone, but it seems unlikely she could move so quickly as to completely hide all the bodies before the others caught up. We don’t exactly know when and how everyone moved to the parlour, so if they didn’t move together, that leaves a window where someone could have tampered with the bodies. There are various groups of characters moving about, and if we decide any of them are conspirators, and find a window for them to act, we could blame them.
Since Battler and Erika are moving around together, and anyone else could be a culprit, there’s a pretty wide open space really. Erika’s anti-tamper seal will probably constrain things, but we don’t know exactly when she placed that.
We know that at some point, Erika is going to accuse Natsuhi of being the culprit. Can we come up with a Natsuhi-dunnit theory? Fairly easily. After all, we have no proof that she stayed in her room and she had all night to act. Seems rather unlikely she’d murder Jessica, but you know, we have to accept someone did a bunch of brutal murders of their family!
That said, I’m inclined to think, just by narrative logic, that Erika must be wrong. You can’t have someone blurt out the solution before the mystery even starts.
Why is Natsuhi so determined to keep Kinzo’s death a secret, even at a time like this? Lambda has made this plot thread really central to this game, but also revealed Kinzo’s death from the very beginning. She must be setting up for something, but what? With a master key unaccounted for, the study is the only remaining locked room. And it’s about to be opened… what will they find inside?
I think of Gaap placing the bodies in there, but that would only cast more suspicion on Natsuhi, as the only person with the key, which is against Beato’s stated aim.
Many questions. I’ll cease speculating there, let’s press on…
Comments
lar0
I did watch Paripi Komei, every thursday.
While reading I had a thought that the beginning of the chapter, with Erika pointing the finger at Natsuhi and then going “how did we get here”, is kind of mirroring more modern police procedurals where we see the crime being commited, and it’s less of a full “who/howdunnit” and more of a “how is the detective going to catch them”.