Pact of the Abandoned Witch

Gameboards
#122

Well.

I mean.

Yeah.

Rudolf was faking his injury, he could walk perfectly fine. He just liked the attention he was getting from Kyrie, which he misunderstood as love through her faked emotions. He was paranoid about someone dying at the conference and when he heard Kanon’s scream, he rushed out of his room, not even thinking about the wheelchair. However, as he was near the end of the hall, he heard Kanon and the cousins approach. Being too far from his room to run back, he hid in either the storage room or the servants’ room (I would’ve accepted either - in both cases the gunshot got covered up by thunder).

The canon for me is the servants’ room. As Kanon, Nanjo and Kumasawa were there, and Rudolf was hidden (recall, the red denies anyone entering without anyone noticing. Obviously, if you’re hiding, it’s a different story. This isn’t really wordplay given the context of that red and the current discussion at the time - in which it was at no point discussed that someone had been hiding in the room prior – which would’ve been impossible for all except Rudolf, who wasn’t even brought up).

Meanwhile, Kinzo, upstairs, during his tantrum, as he threw things onto the wall (which was, as you’ll notice, right next to the gun room), knocked a gun off. The gun hit the ground, causing an accidetal discharge as it fired into and through the ground, and hit Rudolf straight in the head. This is not a trap by any means - it was not a contraption of any kind. It was not planned by Kinzo. There was no contraption being activated aside from the gun (which, you’ll notice, I even comment on in the thread, pretty much saying it shouldn’t be treated as such). And in the given context of the red, again, this is clearly not the scenario being discussed. Therefore, it is not a trap. In the end, it was an accident.

You’ll notice the storage room isn’t above the gun room, but I’m willing to forgive that the gun could’ve just fired off at an odd angle.

Later that night, Kinzo woke up and went to talk to Genji in the servants’ room about hospitalization. Genji and Kumasawa were asleep at the time, and as Kinzo walked in - the first thing he noticed was the smell of blood. He found the body, and upon seeing the hole in the wall, figured out what happened.

The explanation for the storage room… I don’t know. He could’ve just wandered in there by mistake? Whatever suits your fancy.

He took the key off of Genji’s belongings (or just his sleeping person, either is fine; I think a red I gave forbade me from Genji putting the key away somewhere in the room before he went to sleep oops). He then went to the gun room and put the gun back. He put the key back on the sleeping Genji and went to get Rudolf’s body.

The locked room trick is at it was described. His original idea was him framing it on a witch in hopes that his dementia would make him blur reality with his own fiction, and coupled with deteriorating memory, ultimately wipe away his sin of murdering his son. He hid in the room, hoping Kyrie would just leave and alert the others, allowing him to escape. He didn’t anticipate her being cold as fucking fuck, so he had to improvise. While she was in the bathroom, he moved from the closet and hid under the bed. After she left, so did he.

Of course, you may say - this was clearly an accident! How is Kinzo a culprit?! But I disagree - Kinzo is definitely a culprit. If you run over someone with a car, even if an accident, you’ve still killed them, have you not? If in the heat of the moment you move with a knife in your hand, accidentally stabbing and killing someone, are you not a murderer? If this plan had been done entirely intentionally, if Kinzo had managed to get Rudolf into the room and was calculated to knock the gun over, would it have not been murder then? Finally, given Kinzo’s actions after the crime, covering for it and manipulating the facts, his conscience is far from clear.

The solution could’ve been reached through the simple question of - assuming all the alibis are legit, WHEN could’ve the culprit acted? You would soon realize the culprit could’ve never entered the gun room. Once that happens, you realize the gun somehow had to go off in the gun room. That leaves with two problems - one with how Rudolf got there (he didn’t, he was in the room below, and he got there by himself) and how it could’ve been done without it being a trap (it was an accident, and the only one that could’ve caused it was Kinzo). The rest unravels from there.

Meta-reasoning would’ve helped too, I suppose, once you realize that Kanon’s entire narrative has a single significant event told in it, besides his hand injury - Kinzo’s episode of dementia.

Aaand that’s it.

If you find this solution unfair in any way, I sincerely apologize.

Congrats to solving the game!

#123

Oh… Okay…

That was kinda anticlimactic…

So my very first hunch was indeed correct, I should only have better gotten it by the time we reached the point that Rudolf had been walking towards his doom, but I was too concentrated on focusing on a damned imagined alibi trick by then.

Though admittedly, what kind of idiot would leave loaded guns with disengaged safety in their cabinet? Oh right, Kinzo… No wonder Genji doesn’t like cleaning that room.^^

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#124

…Now I feel bad for formulating that so briefly, could have expanded on the reason for Rudolf’s movements more.
It always happens like this, doesn’t it?

Good game though.
I was unsure of it because no traps but did wonder why you hadn’t said the culprit directly pulled the trigger yet, so… good thing I tried. And well, it was still one of the few things that gave actual relevance to the whole Kinzo scene.

#125

Good job, Blackrune.

The final solution rests on a coincidence that is a bit too contrived for my tastes, and I would’ve preferred it if there had been clues in the narrative that could lead to the key parts of the solution, such as having a vase fall down in the corridor outside Kinzo’s study because of Kinzo’s rampage. The length and level of detail of the narrative made me think there are solid clues in the narrative, with most of what happens somehow related to the solution. Then again, you did say very early on that you are no stranger to such misdirection, so assuming that was on me, I guess. Anyhow, I did have fun with this gameboard, and I hope you will make another one some day. Thanks for hosting the game, DAwM.

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#126

True, this one is just about as random chance-y as it gets. Especially since it was a perfect headshot somehow. Those are worse odds than one in a quadrillion.

#127

Just like Kinzo loves his odds, eh?

Well, now it itches in my fingers to post my own ultra-short and super-easy gameboard I wrote for Umineko Day and see whether I could prevent you from figuring it out right away, but alas, no witch rank yet. -.-

2 Likes
#128

Now that you mention it, if anyone could commit an extremely improbable accidental coincidence murder, it would be Kinzo.

…Now I want to make a gameboard with Danganronpa characters and have Komaeda pull off the most ridiculous bullshit blind luck murder I can think of.

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#129

I do have to admit, when I started reading your very first post and saw “Kinzo”, “bullet through the floor”, I thought the game wouldn’t last for more than a few posts. Alas, you got distracted by other things…

I would perhaps agree if it had been a premeditated murder of some kind that rested on that coincidence happening. But the whole idea was that it was a ridiculous accident. And that’s kind of what I like about it, in all honesty. Weird shit happens, so why not this?

One of the things you also start learning after a while is that players are really, really good at catching onto clues where you as the author try to make sure every part of the crime is covered, and that there’s always a trail. Like, IMMEDIATELY. You tell them a vase broke - they know the tantrum is important immediately, no questions asked. That’s why I tried to subvert it by noting two things - that Kinzo did explicitly did throw things at the wall during his tantrum, the damage he’d caused by Kanon’s examination, and then noted that all of the guns were on a wall. Give the player too much, and it’s all over. As you say, it’s a level of misdirection, much like the alibi thing was a to a certain extent (and yet, ultimately, it was key to understanding what had happened precisely because the circumstances of the alibis was so perfect).

Not to mention, most if not all of the things were related to the solution. Kanon’s injury was key to having a reason for Rudolf to get up due to his paranoia. Kinzo’s rampage was key to… well, the whole thing. Kanon commenting on his muscles hurting, Shannon literally passing out, Gohda oddly slacking off, him and Genji needing longer to clean up the kitchen in general - all pointed to signs that the servants were being worked to the bone, which ultimately made it easier for Kinzo to take the key off of Genji as he was passed out. The witch aspect, while not necessarily tied to the murder itself, served as a good way to tie the narrative together. And hey, you could always try and argue that someone had tipped the odds in tragedy’s favor, if you like some good ol’ supernatural twist to it… The only thing one could argue wasn’t set up was the fact Rudolf wasn’t really immobalized, and I’d agree with that. But I think with the nature of the game, you could’ve also assumed he’d left in his wheelchair and gone with the storage room solution, much like Rune had.

Either way, happy to hear you had fun.

Welcome to hell.