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

[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.