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+### Last Time in Amber ###
+
+----
+*"My own role sometimes makes me want to strangle the author"*
+
+----
+
+ * A bonus of 1 additional point per hundred words (up to a maximum of 5) is available to any player who sends us a short summary of what happened last time. 
+ * These should be clearly either an in-character summary or an out of character summary.
+ * Summaries will be published here!
+
+
+
+----
+*Juanita talking to Captain O’Malley, over a large flask of rum*
+
+I just can’t stop thinking – what did we miss? It’s driving me crazy. Maybe if I tell you the tale, you’ll spot something we didn’t. Here, have another drink – it’s going to be a long story.
+
+So, it goes like this. Just as I was preparing to leave for the midsummer ball, I got a trump call from Luke. Yeah, that’s right, the King of Kashfa. Now, he’s not someone I know well - rumour has it he was the one who shot Grandpapa, so I never exactly sought out his company. But he’s alright really, seems like an easy going kind of guy. So when he told me that a Kashfan diplomat had turned up dead in Castle Amber and he needed my help to find out how, I thought, why not? Sounds more interesting than a ball. Those affairs are usually so tedious.
+
+You’ve probably heard that the last two Kashfan diplomats who were leading the talks with the Begmans were both murdered. One stabbed, one poisoned – whether that indicates two different murderers or not, I couldn’t say. General consensus is that the Eregnor Liberation Front are responsible (ELF – haha! Didn’t think that through, did they?). But Luke suspects the Begmans. I didn’t ask on what grounds as I didn’t think he’d tell me. Anyway, because of that, this time they decided to hold the talks on neutral ground, in Kailua of all places. It did no good though, their chief negotiator, this fellow named Shaku, still came to a sticky end. No big surprise – but how he ended up in Castle Amber – that was the big mystery.
+
+I headed off to the ball anyway, since it got me closer to the corpse. There was lots of whispering and secret conversations already going on; it was quite clear who had heard about what was going on and who hadn’t. More importantly, there was no rum. Since there was nothing worth drinking, I talked to some of my cousins (second cousins? Once removed?) to see if anyone was interested in helping out. Luke was offering a reward, after all. Max agreed to see what he could find out, and Bastian and Shade had nothing better to do either.
+
+I told Random that we were investigating on behalf of the King of Kashfa and he agreed to let us look at the body. Turns out it was in the Hall of Mirrors. You’ve heard of it? Sort of explains how the body got to Amber, though I’d never heard of the mirrors going as far as Kailua. Shaku had been stabbed, looked like from the front, so we surmised it was someone he knew. There was a dagger beside him that we recognised as one of Martin’s (not sure if Max was worried or pleased by that). Shaku also had a few trumps in his possession, and it was somewhat of a surprise to discover one of them was one of mine. One that I’d drawn, I mean, not a trump of me. It was El Rocio, Papa’s place. I guess Papa had lent Shaku the trump, maybe he’d done some diplomatic assignments in Deiga in the past. I hoped that was the reason, anyway. The other trumps were Kashfa City, Kailua and a lady named Penelope (I reckoned Luke had drawn those three), plus another one of someone called Lazarus by an unknown artist.
+
+At this point I was more than halfway through the flask of rather excellent rum that Luke had given me, so I decided it would be a great idea to go for a wander further into the HoM. Don’t look at me like that! At least I was sober enough to give my trump to Shade and Bastian first. I tell you, I’ve been to some weird places on my travels. Remember that shadow with all the [Juanita makes some indecipherable hand gestures]... yeah, that place. Well, the HoM, as I like to call it for short, is even stranger. But to cut a long description short, I ended up meeting the ghost of Shaku, who was distinctly unhelpful. Regardless of what I said to him, he just kept repeating the same rubbish over and over. I’d have run him through if he hadn’t been a ghost. I wrote it all down though, like a good little detective. This is what he said:<br>
+*Seek the cuckoo*<br>
+*The first cut is the deepest*<br>
+*All I want more than you is to do right by you*<br>
+*The darkest hour is just after the dawn*
+
+See? Nonsense. Then after that, things got even weirder and a whole lot more vomit-inducing – like the mirrors were closing in and I was being sucked into a whirlpool, with all sorts of disturbing images spinning all around me. Ugh. I saw Papa being burned at the stake. I saw an army pouring from a fleet of ships and sacking the town of Beylul. I saw the younger sister that I never had. Things that could have been, and things that might be. It freaked me out. I trumped Shade and got him to pull me out of there post-haste.
+
+Before I could really recover, someone was trumping me. It was Aidan, Luke’s son. Luke had told me not to recruit Aidan because apparently it’s well known that he didn’t get on with Shaku, and he didn’t want that to compromise the investigation. So naturally I quizzed Aidan on his relationship with the diplomat. He basically said Shaku was a prick. His words, not mine! He also said he planned to get involved with Random’s official investigation but suggested that the two of us exchange information. That seemed fair, so I told him about Shaku’s trumps. Aidan was particularly cagey about Lazarus, saying only that he was ‘one of theirs’. So a Kashfan spy, then.
+
+Next we trumped over to Kailua to take a look at the embassy where Shaku had been staying. It was empty – all the delegates had been sent back to Kashfa already – so we let ourselves in. There was nothing of interest in Shaku’s office, though, and no signs of a fight anywhere. It was around then that I got another trump call from Aidan, who told me he’d found the scene of the crime. I stepped through, and found myself in Papa’s back garden in El Rocio...
+
+Sure enough, there was a blood stain on the grass. Aidan said that Dracon (a new guy in town, presumably a relative but dunno exactly how) had managed to trace Shaku’s last location from the HoM using sorcerous means. I quickly got the servants together and questioned them – obviously I didn’t think Mama and Papa had anything to do with these events, but then after that debacle with the ring last year, you just never know. The servants took some persuasion, but finally told us what they had seen. They’d heard some kind of commotion in the garden sometime just after dawn (yes, the darkest hour – maybe Shaku wasn’t talking total nonsense after all). They’d gone to investigate and seen Shaku duelling with another figure, who looked very much like Coral, Queen of Kashfa and beloved wife of Luke. Shaku took a mortal wound, and the Queen paid off the maids to keep their mouths shut and to clear up her mess. She’d then dragged the body away.
+
+Something about the description that the servants gave us didn’t ring true. Besides that it made no sense for Coral to behave that way, that is. Perhaps the fact that each gave exactly the same description, almost word for word, gave it away. We surmised that their minds had been tampered with, and that someone was trying to frame the Queen. At this point, the rest of the Amber investigators turned up, and a few other things were disclosed: A trump had been found in the bushes nearby, of Patricius, Bastian’s father (another one of mine I’d drawn for Papa); more blood had been found inside the house, a trail that stopped next to a wall, and a scent of perfume still remaining; someone had removed the dagger by Shaku’s body and replaced it with a longsword (but Nathan had consulted an expert who confirmed that neither weapon could have caused the wound); And Max had heard from an undisclosed source that Merlin had been spotted poking around the body.
+
+At this point Bastian went off to trump his father. He was quite insistent that he wanted to do it in private, but Aidan did go with him in the end. Apparently Patricius had no idea about anything that was going on, and said he hadn’t spoken to Papa for a while, so he was no help. Still, seems odd that the trump would be there. Papa is usually more careful. What’s that? No, I don’t know Bastian that well, or his dad. Entirely possible that one or other of them knows more than they’re letting on.
+
+Next, I called Mama to warn her that there were a bunch of Amberites poking around in her house, and 15 minutes later she turned up to play hostess. At that point, Bastian, Shade and I left for Kashfa to speak to the delegates, leaving the others to continue investigating and to eat all the sandwiches Mama was preparing. The delegates insisted that the last time they’d seen Shaku, he’d been heading off to dinner with his fiancée Penelope. They were positive that he’d never returned to the embassy.
+
+So now we knew who Penelope was. I decided to give her a call. A pretty uncomfortable call, as it turned out. No-one had bothered to tell her what had happened to Shaku, so lucky me got to break the news. She was pretty gutted, as you might expect. After the tears subsided a bit, I managed to get her to tell me when she last saw Shaku. He’d walked her back to her apartment in Kailua after their dinner at the Lighthouse, and she hadn’t seen him since. She also told me that Shaku had a bit of an altercation with another man in the restaurant, a stranger who’d dared to flirt with his fiancée. I reassured her that we’d do everything to find out who’d killed her beloved, and left her to it.
+
+While we were in Kashfa, we got ourselves an appointment with the Queen – mainly so Shade could give her a sniff. No, really. He’s a shapeshifter, you see. Don’t tell anyone else that, okay? I don’t think he’d like me spreading it around. He was able to confirm that it wasn’t her perfume in Papa’s house, which was good. Luke wouldn’t have liked it. In fact, that was just the very moment I got a call from Luke, who was raging like an angry bull because he’d heard from Aidan about the attempt to frame Coral. I promised we’d try to find out who did it, mostly to get rid of him. And soon after that, Aidan called to say they’d discovered it was Jasra, the Queen mother, who’d implanted the memories in the minds of Papa’s servants, or so Princess Fiona had told them after examining the poor maids. Seemed unlikely that Jasra had committed the murder though – must have been more like an opportunistic thing. Everyone knows she hates Coral. Apparently Fiona also detected memories of another woman, but even she couldn’t tease that information out, so it seemed like it had been wiped for good.
+
+Next we went back to Kailua and questioned some people around Penelope’s apartment. We found witnesses who had seen him walk her home. After that, he’d stepped into a nearby alleyway and disappeared. And yes, when we entered said alleyway, I did detect some residual trump energy there. We were able to rule out his Kashfa City and Kailua trumps, and clearly he didn’t use the El Rocio one until he turned up in our garden about six or so hours later. He could have called the spy Lazarus, or Patricius, if that trump was his. Or someone else could have called him (though the timing would have been rather coincidental). Hmm? Yes, I guess he could have trumped Penelope and stepped through into her room. A good way to secure a lady’s reputation. I’m guessing you’ve used that trick before yourself? You old scoundrel.
+
+Now I’m thinking about it, I wish I’d spent more time talking to Penelope. At the time I didn’t suspect her of any complicity, but now I’m wondering about *All I want more than you is to do right by you*. Those sound like the words of a lover, no? Maybe if I’d pretended to be Shaku when she answered the call, I’d have got more information – but no, that would have been too cruel.
+When we went to the Lighthouse, the bouncer there confirmed the incident between Penelope and the stranger. Apparently the man had short brown hair, the stance of a fighter, and an Amberite accent, but he didn’t recognise it as anyone from my trump decks, or from a sketch I drew of Martin. After the bouncer had diffused the situation, the Amberite left the restaurant, to go who knows where. Interestingly, Shaku had fancied himself as a decent swordsman, though the bouncer didn’t rate him at all. I remembered Aidan had said something similar. No wonder he thought he was a prick.
+
+Well, that’s an interesting theory you have there, O’Malley. If there is more to Penelope than it seemed, I guess the Amberite could have been her contact, approaching for a quick exchange of information before Shaku returned. Could she be working for the Begmans? A cuckoo in the nest... It’s hard to believe that she would have harmed Shaku though. Her tears seemed genuine enough.
+
+Anyhow... before we could do anything else, Luke called again. It turned out Random had called everyone back to the castle, as some poor fool had accused Martin of Shaku’s murder (accusing the King’s son of murder – there’s a route to an early grave). We all gathered in Random’s office and told him what we’d discovered (he was less forthcoming – he wouldn’t say who had made the accusation). I was pleased to hear that the ‘official’ investigation team didn’t have much to say that we didn’t already know about, so we hadn’t been totally incompetent. The only new thing really was that it had been Merlin who had replaced the dagger with the sword. Idiot.
+
+There was no evidence to incriminate Martin, so Random declared his son innocent, and said he would take over the rest of the investigation himself. So that was that. But one thing did stick in my mind from that conversation – a passing comment of Morgan’s. She said that the Hall of Mirrors tells you “the who, the how, the why and the when”. In which case... hand me that quill, would you?
+ 
+*A piece of parchment with scribbles in both Juanita’s and O’Malley’s handwriting*
+ 
+Who: Seek the cuckoo – Lazarus? Penelope? The Amberite in the Lighthouse? If not Begman or ELF, could some other party want the talks to fail? To destabilise the Golden Circle? What about the perfumed woman that the maids can’t remember. Did she summon the HoM? Who can do that?
+Why: All I want more than you is to do right by you – Penelope again? Was she a spy, but fell in love with Shaku for real, and then confessed, knowing he’d leave her? Was it a crime of passion? Or did he say those words to her? Did he have another lover?
+
+Timeline:
+
+ * Shaku and Penelope go to dinner.
+ * Penelope speaks to the mystery Amberite; Shaku spots them and takes offence; the bouncer puts a stop to the argument; the Amberite leaves
+ * Shaku walks Penelope home
+ * Shaku goes into the alleyway and trumps someone/somewhere
+ * ~6 hours pass
+ * Shaku gets into a fight, and trumps to El Rocio to get away
+ * Shaku is killed in Papa’s garden
+ * A woman wipes the maids memories, and drags the body inside the house and into the HoM
+ * Jasra turns up and implants new memories (how did she know it had happened??)
+ * Shaku is abandoned in the HoM, which goes to Amber Castle
+ * Someone puts Martin’s dagger beside the body
+ * Juanita’s team examine the body, take the trumps and talk to the ghost
+ * Merlin removes the dagger and replaces it with a longsword
+ * The other team examine the body; by this time the ghost is fading
+ * Juanita needs more rum
+