@schxdenfreude sent in this prompt: ∗ 33﹕ sender hovers over receiver’s shoulder as they complete a task . for sayoooo
❝ i do hope you're not getting too excited now. ❞ he glances up at her briefly, then looks back down to the page he had been writing on. he was revising a story he had recently written for the brigade not too long ago. it wasn't as well received as he would've liked it to be, and while he'd like to say it didn't matter to him, it was a little disheartening. he had worked hard on the original — creating a murder mystery for your friends to solve live was a difficult thing. don't even get him started on the cat...
he makes a few more strokes, finishing up the solvable portion of the piece. he'd told sayo about it and she had gotten curious... and given her love of mysteries, it wasn't like she needed his detective character to spell everything out for her at the end. not when she had someone right here to feed her theories. as well as confirm them when the time came.
finally, he finishes, bringing the papers together and tapping edge against the table to make the stack nice and even. he looks over his shoulder once more, holding the stack up for sayo to look over. ❝ for your convenience, there will only be one victim: keiichi-san. it's not a serial murder case of any kind... nor is there more than one suspect. there is one murderer and one alone. i originally made this as a game, so i didn't take the time to come up with a decent motive... this is more an issue of figuring out the trick than anything else. ❞
a little before two in the afternoon, keiichi, arakawa, yukata, mori, suzumiya, asahina, nagato, tsuruya, koizumi, kyon, his sister, and the cat shaimsen were together in the lounge. keiichi, who had a cat allergy, was escorted to his room by mori a few minutes before two. he states his cat allergy only becomes a pain to deal with in smaller rooms, and isn't so bad in wide, open spaces.
before he leaves keiichi states he'll be taking a nap and asks to be woken up around four-thirty, to which mori agrees and escorts him out. arakawa, the butler, also leaves to deal with yukata's luggage.
❝ i've just rewritten the outline, so i may have missed some of the more specific details. if you have any questions, please feel free to ask for the sake of clarification. i did perform this at an actual location, so i have a good image of the space in my head still. ❞
from two to three, tsuruya, kyon, his sister, suzumiya, asahina, nagato, yukata, and koizumi stay in the lounge. koizumi leaves after playing a game with the others, returning at slightly past two-thirty with the cat in his arms, who had vanished before the two o'clock mark. koizumi claims the cat was preventing mori from going into the kitchen. the cat curls up near the heater and stays there. no one leaves the room until a little before three.
everyone except for nagato, yutaka, koizumi, kyon, and the cat leaves the room temporarily. it has begun to snow outside. tsuruya, kyon's sister, suzumiya, and asahina return to the room. koizumi passes kyon a folded paper and asks for him to give it to suzumiya for him. at exactly three, the group in the room begins to play games together. no one leaves again until four o'clock.
yutaka leaves to go to his room, claiming he'll go to open his luggage and that he'll return in five minutes. tsuruya and suzumiya go to the kitchen and return a few minutes later with deserts. yutaka returned in five minutes, as promised. shamisen seems to vanish in this time. no one else left the area.
at about four thirty mori comes to inform the group keiichi isn't answering her calls. she attempted to wake him at the hut, but there is no answer and the door is locked from the inside. everyone goes to the hut. keiichi and the key are both in the room — there is no spare key. the group must break down the door to get inside. they discover keiichi has been stabbed in his bed.
the key to the room was left on the desk, implying that the killer didn't leave through the door. the window is closed, but not locked. the thick layer of snow outside is likely to have concealed the escaping killer's footprints. the hut has an overhanging roof on all four corners, a thin layer of snow accumulated beneath them. it seems that the killer must have gone along the field beneath the roof or along the outer wall of the hut. with the rate the snow is falling, the footprints wouldn't have disappeared with less than thirty minutes of snowfall.
another important detail to note is shamisen, who was found moving around in the sheets of the bed. mori and arakawa claim to have been in the kitchen together from three to four-thirty, when mori went to wake keiichi. they did not leave each other's sight.
❝ to summarize the key points: keiichi-san went into the hut for a nap around two o'clock. the body was discovered around four-thirty. the murdered must've committed the crime within the last two and a half hours. the entrance of the hut is locked from the inside and the key is in the room. there is no spare key, but the window is unlocked, so the killer must've escaped through the window. — it's impossible to head to the main corridor from the hut's window without a trace. having no footprints indicates the original prints have been covered by snow. ❞ he watches her expression as he explains, just as he had watched her read through the case. he wonders if it's any good... he wonders if she'll like it. honestly, he isn't very confident in his writing. he's no agatha christie. ❝ lastly, shamisen is present on the scene of the crime along with the victim. ❞
