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Post by PJ on Mar 5, 2005 7:57:29 GMT -5
“Why yes! Terrible business about Syria. You know, they really aren’t all that bad.” Hehe, that was funny... You acting all innocent...
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Post by Amber on Mar 5, 2005 17:40:03 GMT -5
Thanks for the compliments, everyone. And here's me thinking that this one was worse... In case anyone's wondering, I was the first to speak. I guessed that, by the way you talked.
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Post by Dante on Mar 23, 2005 14:52:25 GMT -5
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Post by Amber on Mar 23, 2005 15:07:31 GMT -5
I love all the effects, did you actually burn the letter, or use computer effects?
On the last one is there 2 or 3 pieces of paper?
Wowie, I really like it. So UA-ish
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Post by Dante on Mar 23, 2005 15:16:13 GMT -5
Genuine fire, Amber. And the last one has been torn into several pieces by somebody.
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Antenora
Detriment Deleter
Fiendish Philologist
Put down that harpoon gun, in the name of these wonderful birds!
Posts: 15,891
Likes: 113
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Post by Antenora on Mar 23, 2005 15:19:25 GMT -5
You rock, D. The burned and tattered documents are very neat. Is all of the handwriting your own?
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Post by Dante on Mar 23, 2005 15:23:01 GMT -5
You rock, D. The burned and tattered documents are very neat. Is all of the handwriting your own? All but the handwriting on G. T.'s note to H. (attached to D.'s letter to The Daily Chronicle). That was done by my mother (because I felt that it needed to be distinctly different from my own). Part III will be coming up at some point in the future. I've already written it, but it's not particularly good - more of a "moving the plot along" chapter than anything else. Pay no attention to the details of it, when it comes - just bear in mind that there is evidence, and it shows something. But of course, that's advice for when I release it. I really love doing U.A.-style things. I really do enjoy that. It's great fun.
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Post by PJ on Mar 23, 2005 16:05:59 GMT -5
Brilliant! The burnt and/or ripped letters add coolness to it all. And mystery... Who's next? The Fire Department? The red-light district? NO one is safe! At least you don't have school....
more time to post here
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Post by Dante on Mar 25, 2005 3:31:17 GMT -5
Here's part III - it exceeds the character limit, so it gets two posts. It's not particularly good - more of a "moving the plot along" chapter than anything else. Pay no attention to the details of it - just bear in mind that there is evidence, and it shows something. I'm not really good at details - I prefer the dramatic sections.
---
In the wake of the K.E.S. fire, there was a lot of criticism. Parents criticised K.E.S. for not building fire escapes. K.E.S. criticised the local council for not providing enough funding. The local council criticised the government for the same reason. The government criticised the main opposition, and claimed that the lack of funding was due to massive economic failures on the latter’s part. Everybody criticised the Fire Department, for failing to arrive in time to douse the fire, or indeed to arrive at all – although the Fire Department quite reasonably protested that they could do nothing without the presence of the Fire Chief, who had been out at the famous Club Purple for an informal meeting with a local expert. But a few facts were clear: Firstly, that the fire burnt the K.E.S. building to the ground; Second, that the police had declared that they were treating the fire as suspicious; And thirdly, that various bureaucracies and health and safety rulings meant that nobody had yet approached the site to fence it off, or indeed made any attempts to secure it all, and as such, as night fell that day, several individuals arrived at the scene with no authorisation whatsoever.
The individuals were an unlikely crew made up of a male adolescent with long red hair who was dressed all in black, another person of the same age and gender, but who had cropped short hair and wore a very thick, padded coat which made this second individual look extremely fat, a third individual, again of the same age and gender, whose hair was black and of medium length, and who wore a suit, which made a clinking, rattling sound as the individual walked, as though concealed within the suit were all manner of strange items, and finally a fourth individual whose hair was black, curled, and came down to his shoulders, and who wore a medium-length green coat.
“So are we all clear on what we must do here?” asked D. – for D. it was, standing hunched in the darkness.
“I, ah, think that I may have missed that meeting,” said the boy with the green coat. D., in response, rolled his eyes, before opening his mouth to speak, an action which was closely followed by him speaking.
“Oh, yes, that’s right. You were – absent. Working on that fire-fighting robot once again?”
The boy with the fat coat suppressed a chuckle.
“Well, er, if I’d had a bit more time, the, er, fire, could have been avoided.”
“But J., J., J.,” started D., “we all know that there’s no chance of ever finishing that project, especially now. Certainly, the other site, being as it is, across the road, was not burnt down, but we never did have enough time. And anyway…” these last words were spoken in an undertone to himself, “there’s no future in trying to put out fires.”
“I’m sorry,” said the suited boy. “I didn’t hear that last bit. You were speaking to yourself in an undertone.”
“It was nothing, S.,” said D. hastily. “Well, now that I know that there’s a problem, I shall have to waste time telling you our mission. Take a seat on some burnt wreckage.”
D. had sat down upon a relatively unscathed chair while he was speaking, which left S. to take a short section of brick wall, the boy with the very fat coat a few charred wooden planks, and J. a pile of ashes which might once have been a curtain.
“Now J.,” said D., “what we are about to do may seem strange to you, but allow me to explain. You recall that in that small article in The Daily Chronicle, it said that there might be a survivor of the fire?”
J. nodded, as did the others around him. For a few brief seconds, they all thought of who they had lost in the fire. S. thought of his very old friends A. and J., both of whom had perished. The boy with the fat coat thought of D., whose real figure and the shape of his coat were in such contrast to his own, which had always made D. laugh. J. thought of nobody in particular, since he had not been very popular. D. thought of each of the people who had died on the second floor – all relatively faultless, and whose only crime had been to hear – or, in the case of J., to see something – which might have been very damaging to him. But then the dark cloud of resentment spread over D.’s mind, and he remembered those things which he disliked about the dead people, or occasions on which they had not treated him well, and any feelings of guilt that he might have had pass. Hastily dismissing the thought, as well as that of the girl who had unfortunately been trying to find her forgotten textbooks in a first-floor room, D. returned to the matter at hand.
“Well,” he said, “The Daily Chronicle said that the fire was started deliberately. It also said that the culprit was the same person who burnt down J.’s house.”
“But my house hasn’t been burnt down,” said J., quizzically.
“No, no,” reassured D., “I mean J., not you. You recall the drug dealer. Anyway, the arsonist probably burnt down K.E.S. because somebody in the building knew that he had committed that first crime.”
“That seems something of a leap of logic,” said the thin boy with the fat coat.
“Hush, J.,” replied D., “it’s not all that unlikely, trust me. Anyway, if there is a survivor – might not the arsonist try and track them down finish them off if they knew who it was?”
“You think so?” asked J.
“Of course,” said D. “That’s probably why the survivor hasn’t shown him – or, I suppose, her – self yet. They’re in hiding, and we need to know where. But firstly, we need to throw the arsonist off the scent by making it seem like there isn’t a survivor at all, by destroying any evidence that anyone escaped.”
At these words, S. and the thin boy with the fat coat shifted uncomfortably in their improvised seats, while J. looked a little unnerved. “Isn’t that perversion of the, er, course of justice?” he asked.
“Yeah, but we’re doing it to protect somebody, and prevent even worse crimes,” said the fat-coated boy.
“No jury in the world would convict us,” said S.
“It’s for the greater good,” said D.
At these words, J. began to look a little more convinced. “So what you’re saying is that we need to fight fire with fire?”
“Exactly!” cried D. “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”
“But won’t destroying the evidence be useless, if The Daily Chronicle is reporting that there is a survivor?” asked S.
“Don’t worry about The Daily Chronicle,” cackled D. “That’s being taken care of right now, thanks to my important connections.”
This cryptic comment puzzled the rest of the group – but there was a look in D.’s eyes that made it clear that he was not going to elaborate.
“So shall we start searching?” asked the thin boy with the fat coat, after a few moments had passed.
“Yes, J.,” replied D. “Time is of the essence when you’re working for the greater good.”
And so D., J., S., and J. spread out through the blackened, smoke-filled ruins of the building, searching for any evidence of a survivor. Sifting through a burnt-out desk, J. found a photograph of a green-eyed man fleeing from a crashed car, but there was no sign of any fire in the photograph, so he dropped it again. S. found a small, heavy golden stone in a box full of textbooks about the sun, but he couldn’t tell if it was valuable, so he put it back. J. was searching through a fridge and came across a small, ceramic bowl with a tight-fitting lid, but there was nothing inside but ashes, so he set it aside. In the end, it was D. who found something important, for he had had the intelligence to check the surroundings of the building as well as the building itself. He called his associates, and they found him poking around at a knothole on a short tree, standing a little way from the ruin, which had escaped the blaze. Noticing that his three friends had arrived, he turned away to look at them.
“Now,” said D., “before you come any closer to this tree, tell me what you see directly in front of the knothole on it?”
The group looked, and saw the clear mark of a shoeprint in the mud before the tree. There was ash trodden into the mud of the print, indicating that the person who had made it had recently been inside a burnt building.
“Is this it?” asked J. “It’s hardly conclusive.”
“I admit that we’ve been very lucky,” confessed D. “I expected more than this. Anyway, we must destroy this evidence.”
“We’ve all got ash on our shoes,” said J. “If we trample all around here, then the police will just think that some of their own officers have been wandering around, and they’ll dismiss it.”
“Yes, quite,” said D., proceeding to trample heavily. “Remember to press down very hard, to destroy all trace.”
All trace was soon destroyed.
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Post by Dante on Mar 25, 2005 3:31:43 GMT -5
“And now,” announced D., “we may all go home and get some sleep, unless there are any questions.”
S. stepped forward.
“That evidence was pretty poor, as evidence goes. It’s completely ambiguous. How do we even know that there is a survivor?”
“I’m glad you asked me that, S.,” said D., adopting a fatherly, knowing tone. “And I can’t give you a full answer to that question – not yet, anyway. Basically, I picked up some other evidence on this investigation, which I’ve already dealt with. I’ll tell you about it when all this is over. So, shall we exit?”
The group turned to leave, but as they were walking away, something caught J.’s eye as he passed by a broken wall section.
“Say D.,” he said. “There’s a broken window here.”
“Of course there is,” snapped D. “The windows all fell out or shattered as their fittings burnt away.”
“I mean,” said J., gesturing at the floor, “that window frame has actually been knocked out, and the handle has been forced. I didn’t notice it when I was looking for evidence of a survivor, because the frame was on the inside – but look, somebody’s forced the lock, and the hinges have been smashed.”
D. walked over and examined the fallen frame. Somebody had clearly forced it from the outside of the building, and shoved the broken frame inwards.
“How curious,” said D., looking genuinely puzzled. “It seems that somebody must have broken in on the day that the building burnt down – it would have been noticed if it had happened the night before. But what could it mean?”
He stood there for quite some time, clearly thinking hard, but eventually held up his hands in frustration. “No. I don’t understand. Let’s just leave and get some rest. I’m exhausted.”
“All of this work is tiring, for just the four of us,” said J.
“Yes, we lost some good associates on the day of the fire,” said D., sounding regretful. “It’s a real shame; they were so helpful to me. I suppose that I’ll have to find us some other people to join our group.”
“A few other people would help greatly,” said J., starting to leave. “We’ll need to start recruiting people to our cause.”
“I’m sure that it can’t be that difficult,” said D. “Look how many of us there were before the fire, in our happy group.” D. sighed. In his mind, he was deeply regretting having had to lose so many of his former associates, but he couldn’t take any risks.
“Curse J. for his keen eyes!” he hissed under his breath. Looking up, he saw that his three remaining associates were each taking their separate routes to their separate homes. Checking to see that nobody was watching, D. withdrew from his pocket the other piece of evidence that he had spoken of – an empty plastic bottle, with some ash covering it, that had clearly once contained water. He had taken it from the knothole on the tree, where it had been hastily stuffed. The survivor would obviously have wished to douse themselves as soon as they’d escaped the building, to cool themselves down and perhaps help to soothe any burns, but had been forced to hastily stow it away upon realising the predicament that they found themselves in – that they were a person who D. wanted dead, and would go to any lengths to destroy if he knew that they were alive. An empty bottle wouldn’t help them in their flight to some hiding place, but just to leave it anywhere would provide sure-fire evidence that they were alive. But they, in their haste, had underestimated D.’s thoroughness, no doubt thinking him merely violent and not cunning as well. D. resolved to wash the ash off the bottle, and then deposit in the nearest recycling bin – for he was a considerate arsonist, who didn’t believe in wasting precious resources.
And thus D. started to make his way home, hindered by the darkness of the night and burdened by the darkness of his heart, his head full of questions and his pocket full of matches.
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Post by Akbar Le Grey on Mar 25, 2005 6:14:11 GMT -5
I love it. The story is teh rawkness and the letters were a stroke of genius.
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Antenora
Detriment Deleter
Fiendish Philologist
Put down that harpoon gun, in the name of these wonderful birds!
Posts: 15,891
Likes: 113
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Post by Antenora on Mar 25, 2005 8:18:05 GMT -5
I love this. Very intriguing.
Perhaps my favorite line:
D. resolved to wash the ash off the bottle, and then deposit in the nearest recycling bin -- for he was a considerate arsonist, who didn’t believe in wasting precious resources.
I vaguely remember you mentioning the thin person in the thick coat before.
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Post by VolunteerS on Mar 25, 2005 23:23:06 GMT -5
Why didn't I see this before?
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Post by PJ on Mar 28, 2005 5:40:32 GMT -5
Nicely done. I like how there is a Snicket-ish feel to things. And the pocket full of matches was pretty cool too. What fate shall J. and his keen eyes suffer? Will they be burnt off? Or will he burn like the others? We shall see....
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Post by Ennui on Apr 21, 2005 8:49:12 GMT -5
I remember the unfinished robot...
Please go on when you have time.
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