Intermission ! Dlanor makes a visit in the Golden Land to Battler, Virgilia and the comatose Beato. It turns out that outside of her job as ruthless witch-hunter, she's quite pleasant a person (and an old friend of Virgilia). She congratulates Battler for his moves, and obviously considers him as a Worthy OPPONENT. (Despite piece-Battler being manipulated by Lambdadelta there, his awesome stunt couldn't have been achievable without his SKILL.) And thus she wants to apologize for holding BACK. Of course, Knox's 2nd principle excludes her just stating that Kinzo is DEAD. But she could have stated that the window was never opened after it started RAINING. Lambdadelta and Bernkastel seem to both be conspiring to keep Grampa alive for now, and are clearly up to SOMETHING.
Dlanor apologizes again for having to work in such conditions, and hopes that when Battler retakes control of his piece, he won't hold BACK. Especially considering that little wretch she is working FOR. That Erika girl is EVIL. And having delivered this warning, Dlanor takes her leave.
As if to echo Dlanor's words, Erika is gratuitously and cruelly torturing the underling who failed to protect the window, passing her anger onto her. When Dlanor comes back, the dutiful witch-hunter sends the poor victim away, and announces she'll take RESPONSIBILITY. This is no fun for Erika (who's too conceited to notice that Dlanor does have a heart), but she's cooled down enough to start thinking again.
Okay, all this mess about Grampa's disappearance is irrelevant. Let's move on to the actual twilights, shall we ? But before that, let's examine that mysterious letter and knock at 24:00. Erika fires off tons of theories, but Lambdadelta dispels all of them : nobody inside the parlor put the letter outside the door, Krauss, Natsuhi and Genji weren't involved in any way, there was noone else inside the mansion, and the 8 people outside — who were the ''only people outside — did not have any way to do it. Oh, and the knock was a real knock on the door.
I won't go into the details of this battle, but Erika ends up thoroughly humiliated, with Bernkastel threatening to discard her like the useless piece she's become.
Okay, speculation time : I'm pretty sure that Lambdadelta didn't rule out the knock being done by one of the people inside the parlor... (Though she did rule out any of them putting the letter there in any conceivable way, so I'm clueless for that point.)
Hum, I'm not sure about this one. Dlanor continues to be an absolutely awesome character. (I admit I'm completely in love with her speech patterns, which are a joy both to read and WRITE. It gives her a very strong VOICE.) On the other hand, this completely demolishes Erika's credibility as a detective, doesn't it ? Of course it has to be done at some point, but this is a bit too much too soon. And we know she'll recover enough to announce Natsuhi's "culpability" later on.
Also, Erika has completely crossed the Moral Event Horizon by now, but that goes without saying.
