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Post by Gelquie on Jan 8, 2013 21:15:57 GMT -5
Gelquie had been out of it for most of the day. While she had decided to eventually eat the night before, she ended up drifting off before that happened. And it turned out Draco was right; she was famished for most of the next day, and she had to resist the urge to drink the materials they were testing. As a result, she was in too much of a bitter mood to be of much use for anything. She finally remembered the loaf Draco gave her and retrieved it. She was munching on a small piece as she listened to the Queen, in a bit of a better mood now.
"I guess I could see why the Princess could lead us here, in order to convict someone else," she said, pausing from her eating. "Still... you said it was broken two months ago. Could it be possible she was covering it up for different reasons? Though I guess we won't know for sure unless we find the shards. And do we know if the mirror was broken shortly after it was covered?"
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Post by ♥ Azzie on Jan 8, 2013 23:08:15 GMT -5
"She... Oh, Your Majesty. I'm so sorry!" Azalea felt a flood of sympathy for the woman standing before her. Her first instinct was to rush forward and hug her, but she suppressed it; royalty didn't tend to take kindly to hugs, she'd learned. Instead she stood there and hugged her arms to her chest.
Why would she do this... she thought. What could she possibly hope to gain?
Mirror shards, said another part of her mind. The Princess herself could be in danger.
"No," she murmured to herself. "Get it together, Azzie, this isn't a story." She shook her head and paused for a moment. "Yes it is!"
She looked over at the Queen, at her dwarven comrades, and at her own hairy arms. She ran one hand over the arm; it felt as real as the blankets had, as the food she'd eaten.
"I have a headache," she said as she walked to the edge of the group, shaking her head again and attempting to get her thoughts in order again.
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Post by Draco on Jan 9, 2013 0:08:07 GMT -5
Draco shrugs when the Queen was done speaking.
"You answered any questions I had."
He stares into the broken mirror. He begins to let his mind wander. A plan begins to whisper into his mind.
"Why bother with this mystery? Who needs these monarchs anyhow? Let us just end this now! We can easily take a shard of this mirror and attack the Queen. Before the butler can do anything we can attack and bludgeon him. We can make it seem like they had a fight, if anyone asks we stopped the crazy butler. Then we can take some of the poison and secretly poison most of the servants.... But then there is the princess. We can easily lock her within her room she hides in. Start a fire perhaps. We can simply leave the materials inside another servant's room. They would be our scapegoat. Yes. This plan is excellent. With the monarch and most of the servants gone, we can rule. This land probably once belonged to us anyhow. So why not take it for ourselves? Kukukuku.... We can rule this land with our iron dwarf fists! WE CAN DO THIS!"
Draco blinks a few times and shakes his head.
"Odd... I blanked out there... Odd..."
He walks over to some of the others.
"So, what should we do next? Maybe we can try to sneak into the Princess's room to search for clues. Or try to set up a trap to trick her into telling us information?"
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Post by Amneiger on Jan 9, 2013 10:35:28 GMT -5
"The Princess doesn't know what we've spoken to the Queen...I think," Amneiger said. "I'm certain that the door to the Princess's quarters are locked, but if she knows that she's a suspect now then security would be even tighter. Your majesty, do you have a key to the Princess's quarters? And do you know anything about the Princess's daily routine that might help us gather evidence or check her belongings for the mirror shards?"
"We were just leaving that cottage out in the woods when the Princess first came to us. I wonder if we'd left anything useful there?" he said to the other players.
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Post by Fraze on Jan 9, 2013 16:03:46 GMT -5
"The Princess sought us out. What do you think she could gain by sending dwarfs out to investigate a crime she very might well have committed? And is their anything in the mirror shards a magnet could pick up?"
"I believe she thought that by asking for your help, she would appear to be interested in apprehending the killer. But this looks like a token gesture; I doubt that she thought you would get as far as you have in this investigation. Also, the metal backing of the mirror is intact. Only the glass itself was broken."
"Milady, is there anyone besides the Princess you can think of who might have wanted the king dead?"
"Many people were displeased with the King and his actions, but most would not have been willing to endanger their own lives to kill him. However, several nearby kingdoms would very much like to conquer our land, and eliminating the royal family is the most bloodless way of doing so."
"Despite the fact that the Princess may very well have broken the mirror, there could be other reasons for that than covering her tracks in preparation for a murder. We don't want to too quickly narrow our sights to one or two suspects at this point and risk missing the real culprit."
"Whatever her intentions were, they were most likely malicious; otherwise, she would have admitted to breaking it."
"Also, who is the Princess close to here in the castle? Talking with her friends could yield clues if she is responsible."
"She is well-acquainted with most of the castle staff, but I do not think she is very close to any of them. I would advise you to be very careful if you try to do this, asking too many questions will make her suspicious."
"Do we know if the mirror was broken shortly after it was covered?"
"This was the final image that the mirror recorded before being broken. It stands to reason that it was broken immediately after being covered."
"Maybe we can try to sneak into the Princess's room to search for clues. Or try to set up a trap to trick her into telling us information?"
"Again, I would advise caution if you choose to snoop around for more information. However, if you choose to do this, you should speak with her servants. Especially, you should try to find out where she might hide the mirror shards."
The Queen rubs the sides of her head. "I think it would be best if you leave. It is not wise for you to stay here for too long."
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Post by ♥ Azzie on Jan 10, 2013 14:33:14 GMT -5
"Thank you, Your Highness," Azzie said, shaking her head. She turned to her friends. "Maybe we should go tell the Princess that we haven't found anything. Maybe she'll be more trusting of us if she believes us to be a particularly dense bunch. It's the only idea I have, anyway. What do you guys think we should do?"
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Post by Celestial on Jan 10, 2013 16:09:17 GMT -5
Celestial, who has been keeping back and chewing on her pipe while everyone else asked the difficult questions, got up and bowed to the queen.
"We'll catch the culprit, your Majesty," she says and turns back to Azzie. "That would be a good idea. While we're at it, we can get a good idea of what her rooms look like and perhaps find one of her servants, one who might be up for a little chat."
She roots around in her pockets, looking for valuables. "Come to think of it, do we have anything nice we can use to bribe one of them? I only have the pipe and I'm not giving that away. It helps me think."
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Post by Tiger on Jan 10, 2013 22:10:16 GMT -5
"I have a frying pan, if the game didn't zap it away," Tiger said with a shrug. "But I'm pretty sure the castle has plenty of those. Anyway - I like Azalea's plan, keep her thinking things are going her way. The more confident she is..." Tiger shrugged again. "The more likely it is she'll mess up.
"And...hm. If we could get her away from the room, maybe one of us can sneak in and search for clues? Or the shards? There're enough of us that she probably won't notice one 'dwarf' missing. Especially if she's not looking at us as a threat."
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Post by Kristykimmy on Jan 12, 2013 11:27:54 GMT -5
Kristy rummages around in her pockets, bringing out the pink cellphone (which won't turn on) and the spearmint lip balm. "I still have these. That's funny, I'd forgotten about them since the first round. I don't think anyone will want my phone, since it currently seems to be a silly piece of plastic, but the lip balm maybe. We'll just have to find someone with really dry lips."
"I'll volunteer to sneak away and look around the rooms if you guys can distract her, but maybe our ninja would be best suited to the job?" she suggests.
She sticks her stuff back in her pockets to wait for the others to finish deliberating about the next move.
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Post by Fraze on Jan 12, 2013 14:56:26 GMT -5
Your speculations are interrupted by a squad of guards, who walk up and grab you.
"We're taking you in," one of them says. "Try to flee and you'll be killed. Of course, you'll probably be killed anyway."
"What did we do?" you protest.
"Don't play stupid. Those shards of the Queen's mirror in your cabin didn't get there on their own. You suck in to steal poison and killed the King."
"What?! We didn't break the mirror. And we certainly didn't kill the King. Why would we do that?"
"To take over the kingdom for yourselves. Think we didn't know about all that 'taking back what is ours' stuff?"
You're taken down to the dungeons. You're familiar with the layout of the room, since you were there just an hour or two ago to test the brandy bottle for poison. You are thrown into a cell with heavy metal bars, and the door is locked.
This will make things difficult.
You sit in the cell for half an hour, until you hear the door creak open. To your surprise, you see Maxwell come in. He walks briskly over to you.
"It's a shame, really," he says. He holds his hands behind his back and doesn't make eye contact with you. "That we were so quick to trust someone with obvious ulterior motives. I hope that the next ruler of this kingdom will be more scrutinizing."
He turns away from you, looking at the shelves of supplies kept in storage down here. "I'm a busy man, you know. I have to coordinate all of the normal castle functions, as well as intermittent castle maintenance and repairs. For example, there's a wide drainpipe in the corner there. They say it used to be a passageway, but it fell into disuse. There are bars at the exit, but in winter the metal contracts in the cold and some of them get loose. The bars of these cells have the same problem. I need to have them fixed one of these years."
He leaves, and you realize a piece of paper is lying on the floor, just barely inside the bars of the cell. You unfold it, and see that it's the image of the Princess that the mirror produced.
You decide to blow this joint.
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Post by Draco on Jan 12, 2013 15:11:50 GMT -5
Draco stares at the drain pipe, and taps it with his foot. This could actually work, just wide enough for us to fit through.
"So, that looks pretty..... Clean? Who wants to go first?"
He tries to imagine crawling to freedom through five hundred yards of dung smelling foulness, but just doesn't want to. He hopes it will be raining outside when they get through it....
He kicks at it a few more times.
"So, we should probably pry this open."
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Post by Kristykimmy on Jan 12, 2013 17:15:53 GMT -5
Kristy pushes through the loose bars and out into the storage area of the dungeon. She joins Draco at the drainpipe.
"I'll go first," Kristy volunteers, staring into the blackness of the drain.
She drops onto her hands and knees and swallows hard, getting trapped in a narrow passage has always been a fear of hers. She crawls forward into the darkness, trying to keep her mind blank and not let her imagination run away with her.
"Feel free to follow, quickly!" she calls back, not wanting to be completely alone in her trek through the pipe.
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Post by ♥ Azzie on Jan 12, 2013 21:40:02 GMT -5
"I'm in!" Azzie said, crawling after Kristy. "Eugh, this smells terrible." As she crawled her mind wandered back to Maxwell and the Queen, and she sighed.
"I hope they don't really think we betrayed them," she said.
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Post by Draco on Jan 12, 2013 22:20:17 GMT -5
Draco continues to stand at the drain, holding the drain open. While waiting for the others he pokes his head into the drain.
"I don't think they believe that. We mentioned that the princess was near our house, and they know what is going on, so it's pretty obvious what just happened."
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Post by Gelquie on Jan 12, 2013 22:30:59 GMT -5
It wasn't a good day already for Gelquie without her being arrested. And she thought things were just getting better. Gelquie ended up spending most of the half hour sulking in the corner of the cell, kicking the wall on occasion. She did have enough sense to pause long enough to hear Maxwell's words. With that, she walked over to the cell bars and stared at them.
"It's either that stinking sewer or we get out through here and find a way through the castle and pretend we're sneaky," Gelquie muttered. "And even once we're out, what do we do? The guards won't trust us. The Princess probably already planned for us to escape if it is her. Why would they have this big a drain pipe in a cell anyway?"
Gelquie let out a sigh and went to stand by the wall, trying to see if she could cast a small illusion in her hand.
"In any case, you go first."
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