Hallowe'en...Late

Traditionally, my writing club has a Hallowe'en party (not Halloween; the hostess is very clear on that). It's always been a murder mystery, like a How to Host a Murder gig, but with a few differences. Difference one would be that this isn't only one murder: the murderer continues to kill people as they see fit throughout the night. Difference two is that the plot line is written by the hostess and a few others every year.

I helped this year.

Of course, since everyone's away at college now, we postponed it a month so we could get everybody. It took place Friday night.

It was very interesting to be on the planning side of things. I've been the murderer before, and I got killed about halfway through the party last year, but I've never had to worry much about the plot line beyond my desire to solve any mystery. This year I was a fortune-telling gypsy, which also gave me the ability to randomly give people direction if they were going too far in the wrong direction.

But it also required a great deal of improvisation on my part. To begin, we started the night's "entertainments" with me telling each character's fortune. I was not expecting that. I thought I would randomly grab people and spurt mystic nonesense, but then, there I was sitting at a round table with an audience of fourteen people. An hour before the party, I had spent five minutes reading up on palmistry on Wikipedia. I couldn't even remember which line was which, beyond the life line. So to supplement my lack, I added a twist. I had a red velvet bag of shiny polished rocks, and I had each person draw out a rock as I was going along. Thus did I invent a great deal of minerology that somehow had to do with the future. I also tried to spice up each fortune by changing how I behaved toward the people.

My success: at least people were laughing.

The second hitch I ran into that night was the fact that I was the first person to be killed off (that wasn't part of the original plan, but we had to do some last-minute adjusting). This normally wouldn't be a problem: ghosts are allowed to interact with everybody, and their motives and all extend beyond death, but they aren't allowed to discuss who exactly murdered them. The problem was my handicap. Ghosts at the party always have a handicap: blindfolding, not using one of their hands, speaking in a whisper, etc. However, since my character had, up to the point of my death, been quite cheeky and altogether too loud-mouthed (I was a gypsy with no respect for authority), I was given the handicap that I could only speak when asked a direct question, and only to answer that question.

Try keeping everyone on the right track when you can't talk unless they want you to.

In the end, my most effective method involved grabbing people's wrists and staring at their palms until they asked me what I wanted to say. Some people tried to get away, though, so I had to employ a rather firm grip. When I couldn't grab people, I had to gesture like a madwoman and caper about endlessly. I can't tell you how many times my facial expressions were misinterpreted because they lacked commentary.

But all in all, it was a very interesting experience, and luckily the plot worked out well enough. And me and my friend have so many ideas on how to make it even better next year!