[SeagullCrazy]

Originally Posted by Drifloon

Hey, Kinjo, I was wondering if you could clear something up for me regarding Fan-EP2. I really didn't follow the arguments properly the first time I read it, so I didn't understand some of the solutions. However, having read the tea party again and followed it more closely, I can't help but be confused about the mystery of Hideyoshi's murder.

Spoiler for Trick of the Golden Witch:

Firstly, am I correct in understanding that the two rooms are opposite each other, and that Natsuhi shot through her open window and Eva's closed window, killing George and then Hideyoshi? If this is the case, then the window should be broken by Natsuhi's shot. And yet it says that AFTER George was shot, he fell out of the window, breaking it, which implies that the window was not broken at that time. I don't see how that can make sense, because the shot must have already broken the window in order to reach George.

Secondly, if the window was broken, shouldn't Kinzo and the others have noticed this when investigating the scene? Yet it said when they found the scene that the window was locked, making it a closed room, with no mention of it being broken. And furthermore, shouldn't they have looked out of the window and seen George's corpse lying on the ground?

Now the next part is what really confuses me. Natsuhi sets the chain and hides in the closet, I get that. But it says that after Kinzo left, she left the room and unset the chain. It's unclear whether this refers to Kinzo leaving to get the cutters, or leaving after he had gotten the cutters and entered the room again. If it's the former, then it doesn't make sense because Kinzo should have found the chain unset when he arrived back at the room. And there is a red that says that between the time Kinzo first arrived at the door and the time one second before he entered, nobody entered or exited the room. If it's the latter, it doesn't make sense that Natsuhi would have had to 'unset the chain' to leave, since Kinzo had already cut it. Not only that, but there is a red that Just before Kinzo, Battler, Maria, and Natsuhi entered, Hideyoshi's body was the only body inside. Now this is an odd red since Natsuhi wasn't actually with the group that went to investigate the room. Is this some kind of wordplay, like it means 'before any of the four entered, there was no other body in the room, but after Natsuhi entered and before Battler, Maria, and Kinzo entered, there was another body in the room'? If so, I can sort of see it making sense, but it is kind of unfair, and the thing with the broken window is still a hole...and the part that says she unset the chain to leave is an error too.

Spoiler for Trick of the Golden Witch:

Yes, the two rooms are opposite each other; Natsuhi's window was open and Eva's was closed. The window was only partially broken (i.e. enough for the shotgun shells to get through) when Natsuhi killed Hideyoshi and George. Once George's body fell through the window, it "broke" completely.

That said, it does contradict the narration given in Chapter 10 (as well as a red I found concerning that fact that there is only one window, when in the narration it mentions 'windows'). I was being intentionally vague at the time during the gameboard, and during the teaparty session did my best to stretch out the solution for as long as possible. Hence the very wordplay-ish "only body inside" red; that almost became a fatal logic error.

In order to resolve it, the wordplay relied on the fact that "the others" was not clearly defined in the blue truth. I used it to include Natsuhi, although I was informed later that this is technically not possible in the English language since they were not really in the same group (Kinzo and the others = Kinzo and Battler+Maria, as they were with him, not Natsuhi). Considering it was one of the first blues brought up to fight that mystery, I wanted to counter it without losing face, so I thought that bit of wordplay would do the trick.

Sadly I think if you're looking for an in-gameboard explanation, you won't find one; it was mostly meta-motives and strategy that forced me to make sloppy inconsistencies in writing. The teaparty sections were written on the spot, and hence I had to quickly come up with red that would deny theories and not completely ruin my planned solution. These debates were left perfectly intact when transcribed into visual novel format, as I refused to fix (or go back on) any mistakes I made. That may be one of the biggest drawbacks of my second fangame: I sacrificed writing quality for difficulty level, intentionally creating both unreliable first-person narration (Impostor Battler) and vague third-person narration (i.e. Natsuhi's and Eva's rooms) to try and make incredibly challenging closed rooms for /seacats/ to solve.

This may or may not have become clear after reading Board of the Golden Witch, as I tried to stress there was a lot of metagaming and wordplay involved in all /seacats/ gameboards.