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I've had a fun idea for this. But it is just an idea at the moment, and time is not a luxury I have at the moment, but I'll see if I can bash something out.

Oh, awesome!

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I am thepointclickadventureaddict!!!

(others feel free to continue Sparticus-style and/or Brian-style mentioning that your wife is also thepointclickadventureaddict)

> Well, if it's fancy where we're heading, put on the top hat and dance through the doorway Fred Astaire style to get a laugh from our sister.

I hear you, but the computers are always going to need new (by humans) prototypes created, before they can fuse them into their own work.

I think "always" is too big a word to use here. Within a decade or two we will probably have robots roaming here and there, on wheels or legs or rotors, with cameras for eyes and a sophisticated A.I. "brain", experiencing the world on their own terms. They will be able to look at the world and make their own artistic representations of it. Sure, they will probably borrow art styles from history, and will mesh them together into something new, but that's just what humans already do. Sometimes that combination is inspired enough to create a style that appears to be completely unique. But it never really is.

All good points, cat. I too preferred Knives Out far above Glass Onion. In fact, I would go as far as to say that it was instantly in my top ten favorite murder mystery films of all time, if not top five.

I did love Glass Onion, but not so much for the mystery as for the characters and setting. It was a nice breath of fresh air to watch a movie with over-the-top characters set in a vibrant colorful location after sooooo many movies recently try to be as grey and brooding as possible. Glass Onion remembered to be fun.

It felt like old-times a lot for me and even a bit reminiscent of movies like "Clue" and even the original "Sleuth", although not quite as obviously in-your-face insane as those. (That being said, "Sleuth" is my favorite mystery movie of all time, just for how batshit insane it gets)

The Name of the Rose?

One of my favorite things in any story is when a plan goes wrong. It can be anything as simple as the firehose wheel almost pulling John McClane back out the window just when he thought he was safe, to the obligatory problems during a heist, to a complete domino-effect of disaster like in A Simple Plan.

Tell us a story where a plan goes wrong.

This looks beautiful!

I'd really like some more votes.

Yeah, we had that big spike in votes a while back. That was fun!

Congrats, Mandle, a deserved win, though I'd really like some more votes.

Thanks for the summery, it's an interesting idea. I just have one note:

Out of all the characters present, the one with the most motive to not want to return to his book is Dante. He is bloody sick of spending his entire existence in Hell.

He doesn't, though. He spends the first part in hell, though not as someone banned and stuck there, but as a visitor, and then he visits purgatory and paradise. And in the end he understands god and his divinity. So... the motive doesn't work...

The idea to see if one can escape a book is still great and to use murder and vampiric transformation as a method is pretty good, just probably not with Dante as the murderer, not with this motivation. 

All good points. Could The Divine Comedy be split into separate volumes in the library? Could this be the Dante from just the Hell volume?

I thought he was just giving Garfield his just desserts for the sin of gluttony... 

Plus, Jim Davis is now upset that his royalty cheques are bouncing. 

That was a joke in the story. There is a popular internet comic series called "Garfield minus Garfield" where the cat has been erased from each one and it just looks like Jon is insane and talking to himself.

https://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

Stuff like this:

Oh, cheers! I will start a new round once I think of a theme. Hopefully soon.

The solution to my story:

Spoiler

As was pointed out, Dante was supposed to have been here before but acted as though this was his first time. Tarzan DID have a moment where the realization that he had met Dante here before almost crossed his mind, but got distracted (yeah, Tarzan wasn't an idiot in the book but I played it for laughs).

Killing Garfield was actually a test to see what happened to a character's story if they died while out of it. This test showed that, indeed, they did not return to the book.

Out of all the characters present, the one with the most motive to not want to return to his book is Dante. He is bloody sick of spending his entire existence in Hell.

He had mentioned so to Dracula over a previous dinner together and they had come up with a plan.

Step one of the plan was already complete. Dante had snapped Garfield's neck while Dracula used his dark powers to plunge the room into blackness and proved that death was an escape route.

The plan from this point on was to have Dracula bite him and drain all his blood, "killing" him, but also allowing him to come back from the dead as an undead vampire himself.

Of course, he didn't know if this technicality would allow him to avoid returning to his book but is basically willing to try anything.

It does end up working. All the other guests return to their stories except for Dante and the dead Garfield, who are most-unexpectedly, rejected by the magical book and expelled out into the real world, appearing in the library basement next to the book.

Dante takes the cartoon cat's corpse to leave no trace of what had happened, breaks out of the library, and the story ends with an undead bloodthirsty vampire Dante stalking our world by night.

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The Shining?

Cheers for the notes, Sini! You did indeed spot the intended inconsistency. As I didn't have a ton of time to round off the story as much as I would have liked, it's pretty tough to figure out the motive without asking a few questions, which I will answer as I said.

I read your story and enjoyed it. I didn't send a vote as I assumed we just cancel out each other's votes. Well, Baron, I vote for Sini, in case that is needed.

I would appreciate any tips!

I hereby introduce you to what is probably my favorite book of all time: "Boy's Life" by Robert McCammon. It IS a murder mystery, but also so much more. I dearly love this book and always return to it, and to the lovely town of Zephyr with all it's wonderful characters, once every couple of years.

(Not to be confused with the DeNiro movie "A Boy's Life" in any way, shape, or form)

For some reason Detective Blanc (Daniel Craig) feels for me like the anti-Poirot.

Spoiler

just, in the first movie, my memory is that his character was not very smart, and in this second movie for me it felt like they retconned as he is smart but lazy

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One thing I loved about both Knives Out is that they are original movies with original characters, it's good to have new movies that are movies!

Spoiler

Ah, I caught a lot more about his character on rewatches of both films. I feel that in both of them, the way he presents himself is usually for the benefit of the other characters and not the real him... a means to an end.

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[BETWEEN THE LINES]

BETWEEN THE LINES
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The book sat still, sandwiched stationary between two others just like it had sat for the last three hundred and sixty five days. The dust on the compressed top of the roof its pages made between its brown covers had been so undisturbed by movement since the last New Year that the motes stacked in latices like a lacy off-white snowfall. This year the book's title on its spine, written in dull, gold-foil beneath their own comparatively light coating of dust, read, "YO! PARTY'S HERE, BROS AND BRO-ETTES!".

Every year the book reshaped the gold foil letters and wrote something different on its spine, depending on its mood. This year, it felt frisky.

It started to vibrate side to side inside the tight vice its neighbors made. Slightly at first, and then faster and faster as the letters embossed on its spine began to glow and push their golden light out into the gloomy, narrow corridor holding book after book after book that was just one of the many rows of shelves in the basement of the New York Public Library. 

The delicate structures of dust on top of the book shifted on their foundations and started to gently crumble but then the book made a sharp upward and downward "THUMP" on its shelf, and the latices collapsed all in a rush. Their dust puffed out in a cloud into the aisle. The letters on the book's spine glowed ever brighter as it fully woke up and started thumping up and down harder and faster, the intensely strobing light sketching flashing cones of yellow through the cascades of dust it had created.

"This will wake the idiots up," the book thought to itself.

******************************************************************************************************************

Somewhere, way up in the library proper, above its basement, another book began to move. It started to slide out in jerky motions an inch or so at a time until it tipped over its center of balance and fell, with a spin through the air and a fluttering of pages, and then landed shut again on the floor, with a thud that sounded quieter than the echoes that bounced back from around the library's cavernous space moments later.

The book just sat there at first, almost as if waiting for the echoes to return, and then started to vibrate softly on the wooden floor once they had. It slid around a few centimeters each way here and there, like a modern phone on vibe mode would on a hard tabletop, but then suddenly stopped still and something much less modern flipped the book open from within. The book's cover, which read, "Dracula, by Bram Stoker." thudded open onto the floor. Pages flipped themselves from front to back in a flurry and then abruptly stopped.

From out of the black letters on the open pages a grey mist began to pour out. The mist was thin and almost transparent at the roots of the book's angular printing but flowed and coalesced into an onion-like shape above its open pages. At the tip of the onion it stopped, gathering more grey mist from below until no one would have been able to see all the way through it, if anybody had been there to see.

Then the onion of smoke seemed to squat down and pause, and then leap up and narrow into a smokey snake which dashed through the library as other books around it fell off of their own shelves, hit the floor, and snapped open.
 
From all around the vast rows of bookshelves in the library, and, in one case, from a newspaper discarded in a trash can, eight distinct ropes of dusty grey smoke wove their way from the stories that had birthed them, snaking down aisles and through the narrow gaps over the tops of the uninvited books in the shelves, all headed towards the basement.

A few flights of stairs later, and after some splitting and reconverging, the smokey streams homed in on the golden spray of light from the glowing letters on the party book's spine like moths to a flame, and slammed into it, puffing just a little of their essence of classic story characters out to the sides, before even that was drawn back in in a hushed rush when the tails of the trails quietly hissed into their rectangular host.

The golden light of the party book's spine flickered and then dimmed to nothing. All were in attendance and nobody else would be admitted now that the annual festivities had begun.

******************************************************************************************************************

Dracula drew his head up from its slump and looked around at the other guests who had been invited this year.

There was no way for him to know how many years it had been since he had last been here in the grand hall with its towering rich-brown walls of oil paintings and long, candle-lit table.

He had played out his part in his own story countless times since the last time he had been gifted this wonder. Countless in the literal sense of there being no possible way for him to tell how much time had passed in the world outside of his story. And now, with a wry curl of his thin burgundy lips, he reflected, with the wit that Bram Stoker had written into him, that his own book was currently "Count-less" as well. 

The wonder of being free to do such things as blink his own eyes or turn his own head outside of the behest of his book's text was intoxicating. He took the best advantage of this ability to turn his head and eyes to take in the other guests that were fortunate enough this year to be here with him.

The first thing he saw was that he was at the head of the long table this time for the first time ever. The next was that Sherlock Holmes sat in the first seat from him along the left-hand side of the table, and that Jay Gatsby sat across the table from Holmes in the chair to his own immediate right.

He gazed further down the table and, in turn from left to right sides, sat Tarzan across from Ebenezer Scrooge, and then Samwise Gamgee, seated next to Tarzan, who towered above him even while seated, in his muscular, loinclothed glory, and across from Sam was Dante Alighieri. The next pairs down and across the table from each other were Lady Macbeth on the left and Lisbeth Salander on the right.     

At the far end of the table, facing Dracula head-on over its long length, sat a very fat, striped, orange cat named Garfield.

******************************************************************************************************************

The fictional characters all looked around at each other, taking in the guests this year that they would be dining with.

Over the century since the party book had ended up here at the New York Public Library, some of the guests at the table had met each other before, and some hadn't.

Dracula knew Dante, and both knew Scrooge and Tarzan and vice versa.

They had all dined together here in the past in various combinations.

Sherlock had been here a few times before, but never in the company of any of the current guests.

Things got a bit more complicated after that though, as was always the case when dealing with newcomers.

Everyone reacts differently the first time they are ripped out of their stories. The party book doesn't even seem to care at which point in a character's book they are yanked out from.

Even among the returnee guests, glances went back and forth between Dracula and Dante and Scrooge and Tarzan. All off them long-timers.

Tarzan spoke up first and said, "Me Tarzan". Then, pointing a muscular finger, spoke across the table saying, "You bad Scrooge or nice Scrooge?"

Sherlock Holmes puffed out a cloud of smoke from his pipe and said, "I do not think that I'm impressing anyone with my deduction that we are in the presence of the Greystoke's heir's state BEFORE he left the jungle this time."

Tarzan glanced down at his almost naked body, winced in frustration, and struggled and failed to find a comeback before the old man across the table replied.

"I'm me at the end of my story!" said Scrooge, a gleeful smile creasing his elderly face, and rushed on with rosy cheeks glowing, "Merry Christmas to all! Sorry about all the 'Bah, humbugs!' the last time. I was horrible back then." 

There was a "HRRRMPHHH" from further down the table and Dante spoke up and said, "I'm glad all you people who are USED to this are having a good time with it. For me it's even a bit more confusing than Hell."

Tarzan looked over at Dante. It was quite alarming for the others, even those who were used to it, when the mountain-crag that was his jaw snapped around so fluidly on the massive pillar of his neck. His eyes seemed to have a thought behind them but then grew unfocussed as he was distracted by Sherlock replying to Dante's confusion.

"Ah, it is quite elementary." said Sherlock to Dante. "There is a book in the basement of this library that pulls us out of our stories. We never know when that might be for us. I, for example, was just examining the wrist of a murdered man and then felt the tug and now here I am. The food can be excellent though, as well as the freedom to be as we truly are for a short time."

From the far end of the table Lisbeth started to say, "How do I let go of the feeling of the golf club that I just had clenched in my hands? I can still feel it and it's so wei..."

But she was cut off by the deep, throaty cry of, "LASAGNA!".

All eyes turned to the foot of the table where sat the very fat cat called Garfield, outlined in bold black pen strokes filled in with bright orange fur overlayed with deep dark stripes. It was the first time a cartoon character had sat at the table and even the stoic Samwise was opening his little Hobbit mouth to say something about it when suddenly...

The tall twin doors at the back of the dining hall behind the cartoon cat burst open. The servants that flooded through the blinding light that beamed out through the portal were hard to look at, even for the fictional characters. There were moments when the servants seemed to run on spindly spider legs that made skittering footfalls along both floor and wall, and then moments when they swirled and reconfigured into floating blobs that spun and extended barbs that turned into the politely gloved hands of butlers and delivered the dinner-laden dishes of the evening softly onto the table in front of each guest before rushing away in a storm of spinning, diamond-shaped particles, back out through the doors that slammed shut behind them.

Dinner had been served.

******************************************************************************************************************

A hush fell over the room as the characters all ate. Slowly at first, but then with greater gusto. Food and drink never had the same "punch" in their stories as it had here in the magical dining hall. Occasionally they glanced back over their shoulders to where, somewhere behind each of them, the oil painting displaying the scene in the story they had been pulled from hung as stark reminders to make the best of all this before the evening drew to a close.

Dracula swirled his port-glass of questionable wine and smirked down the length of the table, his palm pressed flat to its base, questionably warming the thick red liquid inside. The plate before him lay as bare as it had before the "waiters" had entered.

Tarzan, ignoring the silverware on either side of his plate and just digging into his shoots and berries with his now juice-stained hands caused the corner of Drac's lip to curl in amusement.

Holmes dined on his roast beef and shepherd's pie impeccably, although Drac saw the detective's eyes darting this way and that from under the brim of his deerstalker hat.

Sam was engrossed in his potato stew and reached often for the pepper mill to grind showers of black specks onto each stratum as he mined his way single-mindedly towards the bottom of the massive bowl.

Lisbeth only picked at her green salad, her glances as attentive and suspicious as Sherlock's but not even nearly as concealed.

The weird cartoon cat-thing called "Garfield" was face down in its square lasagna dish chomping away with disregard to any kind of human table manners, spraying the table with chunks of meat-covered pasta and sprays of cheese and sauce.

But it was Dante that Drac's red-rimmed eyes were drawn back to the most. The Italian was only barely picking at the pasta before him, spending much more of his attention on the oil painting behind him. The painting showing the red fires and molten orange lakes of Hell itself.

Their eyes met, the vampire and the man who went to Hell. A brief glimmer of mutual understanding at their wretched conditions passed between them. Dracula felt his emotions swell and closed his eyes to block out this silent moment of kinship.

And then the room was plunged into darkness.
 
******************************************************************************************************************

"OOOOOOK-EEEEEK-OOOOOOOOOK!!!"

*BUMP-THUMP*

"If anyone comes even near me I'll gouge their..."

"Please remain calm and do not move! I will investigate once the..."

"Daisy! Help! I need you!"

*MEATY SNAP*

"Most annoyance be, if another damn spot landeth on me..."

*Slurp-slurp-slurp*

The darkness fled away just as fast as it had descended.

******************************************************************************************************************

All heads turned to the far end of the table where Garfield lay slumped, his neck broken at an unnatural angle, bleeding out into the pit he had eaten into his dish of lasagna.

Behind him, his painting showed the newspaper comic strip with him still absent and never to return to it: Garfield minus Garfield.

Most of the other guests around the table had never even suspected that such a thing was possible, that someone could die outside of their story never to return. That would make for a very confusing read.

"The game is afoot," said Sherlock.

"You bet your balls it is!" sneered Lisbeth.

Spoiler

I'm not going to provide the solution to the murder here just yet. I think it would be more fun to let YOU GUYS solve it. Everyone is welcome to offer solutions and/or ask questions, some of which I will probably even respond to. The goal is to expose the guilty and their motivation. And then I will probably write the conclusion to the story and post it as well, because I've grown to love this little tale.

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The title says it all really. For background, I had trouble posting a story in the Fortnightly Writing Contest before and there was a lot of fun poked at me for being a "blacklisted writer"... Which was pretty funny, but not so funny now that it has happened AGAIN!

testing my white-list status... sorry.

GODDAMIT! I JUST FINISHED MY STORY BUT I'M BLOCKED BY THE F**KING "WHITE LIST" FILTER AGAIN!!! Gonna try and sort it out... AGAIN!!!

Edit: But it lets me post THIS here... why not my story?! Is it because of length?

(Please, no jokes Baron. This is seriously pissing me off!)

IDEA I HAD AFTER WAITING FOR SEVERAL HOURS TO GET UNBLOCKED AGAIN: Hmmm... What if I include the story in THIS POST I wonder... ONE EDIT LATER: Yup, it worked. Seems that I'm only blocked from making further posts but not from editing past ones so here is my story finally:

EDIT: Well, I tested it today and it would let me post the whole story in a new post below, so I'll delete it from this one and leave it there.