week one, after the first siren meeting

[itsalluseless]

[Once the meeting is over and the Sirens start making their way back from the hidden hut, Battler pauses for a while near the end of the path. He's got a piece of paper in his hand and is staring at it, expression a mixture between sadness and determination.

He might be a little distracted, but now might be a good time to approach him for a private chat before everyone returns to the village.]

Comments

[hydrazine]

Okay.

[With that out of the way... This is just idle curiosity, but she wants to see what he'll say regardless.]

You got any idea why he picked you? I don't buy the whole protagonist reasoning he gave, whatever he meant by that.

[itsalluseless]

Well, I mean... technically I guess I am a protagonist back where I came from.

[Because fucking Umineko.]

But he's probably got some other reason. Maybe it's that I've got some experience with murder mysteries, I don't know.

[hydrazine]

[Interesting.]

Murder mysteries? Like... Old novels?

[itsalluseless]

Those too, but also actual murders.

[hydrazine]

Oh.

[Even more interesting.]

You law enforcement or something?

[itsalluseless]

Not at all. I was just the only one who could solve the murders.

[hydrazine]

[Skepticism leaks into her voice, but she asks rather than denying the possibility altogether.]

And... Why's that?

[itsalluseless]

It's... complicated, but to put it simply, everyone else stopped thinking.

[Also the murders were specifically designed for him to solve, but he doesn't know that yet.]

[hydrazine]

You don't have to put it simply for me.

[Unless he wants to. She's fairly confident she'll understand anything he tells her.]

Something went wrong with their heads?

[itsalluseless]

Okay, I can tell you the whole story if you want, but... it's kind of long. And like I said, complex. I honestly don't understand everything about it myself.

[Please don't let Battler explain Umineko to you, Raven. Spare yourself.]

[hydrazine]

It's fine. I'll understand it.

[An overabundance of ego is listed on her profile for a reason.]

[itsalluseless]

...Right.

[He takes a breath, trying to figure out how to explain it all.]

So, first of all, I guess I need to tell you about my grandfather, Kinzo Ushiromiya. He used to tell us all this story about how one day he met a witch called Beatrice and she gave him ten tons of gold, which he then used as the basis for building his business and wealth. Obviously the part about the witch is suspect, but I know for a fact that the gold exists. It's also likely that there was a woman called Beatrice that he had an affair with, but there's less proof for it.

So after getting rich, Grandfather bought an island called Rokkenjima and moved his home and family there. Nobody really knows why; he was always really eccentric and only got worse with age. He had this crazy obsession with Western culture and occultism. Supposedly after Beatrice died, he started researching black magic in an attempt to resurrect her.

Pretty straightforward so far, right?

[hydrazine]

[It sounds incredibly strange to her, but there's nothing she doesn't understand... Bar one thing.]

What's occultism and black magic?

[itsalluseless]

[Oh, god damn it. This is not a problem he expected to run into.]

It's, uh... it's this stuff some people believe in, I guess? They think they can use things like magic circles or rituals to cast spells. Black magic has traditionally been seen as more evil or forbidden because it deals with summoning demons and raising the dead and stuff like that.

[hydrazine]

[It sounds strange to her, but after a moment:]

...Weird, but I got it. Go on.

[itsalluseless]

Right, so. After Grandfather's children had moved off the island and started their own families, this tradition started where once a year all of us would collect back there and have a family conference. Which basically meant that the adults would talk about how their businesses were doing and what they'd achieved during the year and stuff like that, while my cousins and I got a chance to hang out and play together. Around that time, when I was a kid, these stories started going around of Beatrice. That she lived in the woods of the island and would catch naughty children who went off the path and so on, the kind of things you tell kids to get them to behave. But over time the stories started getting more and more popular, especially among the servants, and it's like they really started to believe that Beatrice really existed on the island and would punish people who spoke of her disrespectfully.

Around two years ago Grandfather put up a huge portrait of Beatrice in the entrance hall of the manor, and this weird epitaph beneath it. It's worded kind of like a riddle, so that's what everyone immediately assumed it is. Word started going around that it led to the hidden location of the gold, and anyone who solved it would get it all for themselves, along with inheriting the family headship. Grandfather refused to say anything about himself, and no one managed to solve it, so no one knew for sure.

...And I think that's most of the backstory you need to know before I get into the actual story, which took place on this year's family conference. Still wanna hear it?

[This is going to take so long.]

[hydrazine]

I'm getting the feeling your family is ridiculous, even by normal Earth standards.

[But she's following, somehow.]

[itsalluseless]

You'd be absolutely right about that.

[He hasn't even started on just how ridiculous.]

This year was my first family conference in six years. It's not really important what that's about, just that I didn't have any contact with the Ushiromiyas during that time. So it was a little weird for me, I had to kind of get reintroduced to everyone and so on.

There was a typhoon coming in on the first day, so we all expected to be stuck on the island for a couple of days. If everything had gone as normal it wouldn't have been any kind of problem.

[Okay, enough procrastination. If he's going to tell this whole story, he has to get into what was actually going on with his family.]

The main issue at the conference, at least for the adults, was the matter of Grandfather's inheritance. My dad and all of his siblings were having some pretty bad financial troubles, so they all wanted to get their hands on the money as soon as possible. Things got pretty tense between them all, to put it mildly.

And then in the evening of the first day, we got a letter from Beatrice.

[hydrazine]

Well, that's foreboding.

[She gives a nod, though. She's managed to follow all of that.]

I'm with you.

[itsalluseless]

[He reaches into his pocket, pulling out the paper he'd been looking at earlier, and hands it over to her.]

That's what it said. Obviously, none of us thought it could actually be real. We thought it was a trick from Grandfather, or maybe some outsider lurking on the island in secret.

[hydrazine]

[She reads over it, her lips twitching into a grin.]

I bet everyone's reactions were a sight to see, either way. What happened next?

[itsalluseless]

[Battler's expression, meanwhile, is about as far from happy as it can get.]

We couldn't figure out what it meant, so after a while we just went to bed.

The next morning, we found out that six of us had been murdered in the night.

[hydrazine]

Oh. Well, that's way more intense than I expected right at the start.

[Yikes.]

[itsalluseless]

Over the next 24 hours, eight more people were killed. Each of the murders was done in a way that made it look like the culprit was a witch. Magic circles, locked rooms, more of those letters... it was a big mess.

And then, at midnight, it all ended. Beatrice supposedly revived, and no one was left alive.