Madagascar

Bah, logic is overrated. Brute force is needed to crack this case. I say we line everyone up from smelliest to least smelly and let Scarry the forensic pig give them all a good sniff-over for clues. And also truffles. Now some of you may be concerned about alleged incidents where "innocent people" with truffles in their pockets were lunged at and partially eaten by forensic pigs. This is entirely untrue. There are no innocent people, everyone commits an average of five felonies a day.

Mad steeples her horrible, poorly manicured fingers. Ohhhh and someone falling or tripping or being pushed into water would make a splash ... or a sudden sound! Sounds convincing! Clearly whoever is in possession of these clues ought to be immediately secured to a heavy vertical wooden post, doused with a properly flammable liquid, and given 20 seconds to say their prayers. Who is this wretch? Whoever they are, they must be immediately and mercilessly-- Uh wait hang on ... give me a rain check on that one.

*raises hand* I solved the crime! Well Scarry, my noble crime-solving pig did. It was an accident. Thus there was no crime. We can all go home now. *cold silence ensues* All right. I am gathering that the answer is no. "Accident" and "sudden sound" seem to imply sudden violence, such as a fall. Perhaps accidental poisoning, but poison was not selected.

Bah! You call this a mere "game"? There are people's lives at stake here! Families! The fragile social contract which tenuously separates man from beast and prevents our societies from dissolving into a nightmarish muddle of pure unbridled chaos! Oink: A chance at redemption for past misdeeds and to be reinstated as Oracle back home by solving the case and proving once and for all that torture works. That as well. *scribbles down in notebook while loudly mouthing words* John ... Not a Murderer ... Smith ... confessed ... to being in close proximity ... to multiple previous homicides ... recommendation ... 45 minutes on the rack ...

*Mad and Scarry the forensic pig glower suspiciously at everyone with two pairs of beady little eyes* I don't trust a single one of you. *human and pig glower intensely at the PET BIRD that has just appeared on their desk* No, not even you, chicky. *glares at PET BIRD intensify* I bet you did it. Or if you didn't do it, you know who did. *grabs birdcage and starts shaking* TALK! TALK, STORM YOU, TALK! "*desperate squawking* YOU KNOW THE TRUTH! YOU'VE SEEN! NOW TELL ME OR I'LL THROW YOU TO THE PIGS! *SQUAWK SQUAWK SQUAWK* "P---P---POLLY WANTS A CRACKER" Throws the PET BIRD aside. I knew that chick knew something. Now I have a name. All I need is a face to fit it with. I'm going to be reinstated to the force in no time, guys.

Reprehensible reprobates, the lot of you. I have no doubt you have all done something illegal in the past, even if we are for some reason focusing only on one case. If I were the Oracle, I'd have you all tied to spits and slowly fed to pigs until the truth came out. Some people might say that's why I've been banned from Oracling on over six worlds. I say that the people saying that are the reason crime still exists.

Hello future enemies. I'm Mad, former Oracle who had to leave the force city in disgrace after beating a suspect with his own leg. He was an acrobat. It didn't hurt him nearly as much as he claimed in court. Now I wander from town to town solving mysteries with Scarry, my trust cadaver-sniffing pig. He's also good at sniffing through trash, which is useful when I don't have much to eat. Mystery solving doesn't pay much these days.

I was thinking at one point, once it started looking like there were no alignment scanners, of claiming to be one myself and having the ability to psychoanalyze people to see if they were sane or not. That would have been an interesting way to try to twist Psychiatrist. That or just my actual power, sans conversion, on the grounds that as a mental health professional I was used to fighting insane people and thus could put them in straitjackets the first time they came for me. In the end, I was lazy and it didn't seem like I'd really tell everyone that even if I weren't evil so I just let the pigs do the talkin' I guess.

I just think that it's funny that of the total two games I've played here, I've always had a role with two lives. Clearly everyone should just give up trying to kill me at all, ever. Anyway, I thought it was quite interesting, and might have to steal the Crazy Ivan role sometime when I make my own games.

Well, although it was still a definite mistake on my part to sign up, it was a pleasure meeting and then subsequently killing all of you.

I know, right? It really is something. The pigs are all right. Just very hungry. Nabbers and I have been wrestling in the mud over this piece of chouta, which has remained miraculously unstained, for the past several hours. He wants to sell it and I want to give it a proper burial. I suppose we'll find out what its fate is soon.

No, no, liberate the means of production to um, preserve the dignity of ... the ... prol ... prol ... I can't remember nuffin. But look it's all, like, totally for a noble idealistic reason, not because I'm a crazy *hic* person who is clearly not actually a legitimate medical professional of any kind who is trying to get out of paying her tab on the chouta cart.

I ... I smell a rat here ... I don't mean in this chouta ... in the sense that everything you say is riddled with lies, horrible lies! And also maybe in the chouta! Look, I'm gonna have to confiscate this and your entire chouta stand for forens*hic* testing, Nabbers! I'm saying this as a totally legitimate psychiatrist who also happens to be in charge of Kharbranth's health inspection office!

*jumps screaming onto the chouta stand and waves chouta in everyone's face* I FOUND THE TAIL, NABBERS! I *sob* FOUND THE TAIL!

You *hic* know what you did, Drought! The evidence for your crimes has been reviewed. You've been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death in absence for your terrible crimes by a fair, impartial jury *twelve pigs dressed in black jurists' robes waddle into the scene and start eating garbage* Your crimes, they are *hic* so horrible that no one who's seen the evidence can stomach to describe them. The pigs were traumatized for weeks. How could you be such a *hic* monster? Nabbers, I *hic* don't have money, but I do have a very particular set of pigs. Pigs that make me a nightmare for people like you, that I have *hic* acquired over a long, illustrious career in psychiatry. If you let Plumpy go now, that'll be the end of it. But if you don't, they will come for you. They will find you. And they will *hic* kill you.

Well, at least I'm not *hiccup hiccup* pure evil, like you! *oink hic oink hic oink hic*

Probably not at this point, really, because pretty much all y'all gotta die, tragically, and as the 14th reincarnation of Napoleon Bonaparte, it is my patriotic duty to bring PIG JUSTICE unto the political criminal Nabbers with my bare hands for his crimes against piggery, leaving you as the only other option for the justice of the mob, because of all of those horrible things you did. *Mapadonet's eyes cross and she leaps onto the podium in a straitjacket that she has resewn to look almost like an 18th-century French military uniform waving a rusty spoon like a cutlass* VIVE LA *hiccup* KHABRANTH!

That was a heavily Madagascar-inflected way of saying, "Hey, the guy who's disappeared for three days came back literally just in time to vote for me, well that's not suspicious at all <sarcastic>, so I'll vote for him out of self-preservation, petty revenge, and most importantly for DRAMA." It's okay if you don't understand it. I understand my insistence on incorporating pigs and hiccups into literally everything I say may make me slightly harder to interpret at times, a self-imposed limitation I refuse to abandon out of principle even though it probably would have made a lot of things way, way easier. Heck, even people who know me to those who know me well, like these pigs, sometimes take a while to figure it out. I will say that *hic* even if I were a citizen, Nabbers and you *hic* serendipitously returning at the last minute to vote for me would be highly, highly suspect to me and I would probably vote assuming the circumstances spoke for themselves. Chances are I'd be acting way more ridiculously incoherent than I am now, to be honest. That's really kinda how Mapadonet rolls -- on a wagon made of pigs. But really that's all besides the point. You are obviously evil and you know what you did. Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!

Liberate the means of production from the corrupt bourgeoisie! More evidence that the corrupt chouta monopolist feels no remorse for the suffering of the masses! These are the conditions under which the exploited porcine proletariat suffer! This is what they endure! Only a living wage, unionization, and the severed head of the Great Chouta Tyrant on a pike can bring about the change we need! Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité! *hiccup hiccup hiccup*

Pah! So it comes to this. The chips are down, the masquerade is dropped, the character you forgot about in Act 1 suddenly emerges from backstage in Act 3 and turns out to have been both the murderer and your long lost identical twin from Paraguay all along. The pigs are sitting on the edge of their seats, both due to the dramatic nature of the situation and because pigs do not fit well in standard theater seats designed for human use. I wouldn't have it any other way. Meaning I now have an excellent reason to advise we dry up Mr. Drought until he dies dramatically of dehydration as he is, like, clearly evil. Yes, yes, I know dehydration is typically a long, slow death which not well suited to depiction on the stage in the typical sense, but I figure we can MacGyver a machine out of spare parts from the Kharbranth dump to do it right quick with the power of SCIENCE . Furthermore, his remains will be useful as theatrical props in my darlings' newest low-budget stage production (coming to a Kharbranth theater NEAR YOU this April!) *hic*

Pah! Well why are YOU voting for ME? No one gives Mapadonet no respect. Mapadonet votes for someone because they're making no sense. "Noooo, Mapadonet must be evil." Someone votes for Mapadonet for no reason, "Yah, makes sense, let's kill Mapadonet." Mapadonet happens to exist and this strikes someone as being intrinsically wrong. "Yes, let's kill Mapadonet, why not." Bah. I know the score. *sniff* *hiccup* Oh, I remember this happened to *hic* my poor widdle sister Matilda too, you know. She was *hiccup* always having to move from town to town because the villagers thought she was a *hic* witch. Just because she was hideous an' 'ad a warty warty nose and owned eleven dozen cats. The emotional and physical toll this took on her was terrible. I watched from afar as my bright, lively big sister became a drunk an' a cat hoarder. Eventually, she were found *sob, hiccup* burned alive. Mah own sister. Mah flesh an' *hic* blood. Murdered by people she trusted and-- well, actually come to think of it, she didn't really trust them but they murdered her is the point I'm making. Just fer *sniffle* bein' different and hideous and horrible smellin'. Even worse, the meanies killed her cats too. All of them! Even the *sob* widdle kitties. At least she was too drunk to feel the flames. Cats weren't, though. Pretty sure they suffered incredibly. Anyway. After that I swore that the same thing would *hiccup* never happen to me. Never ever. I thought I'd *hiccup* learn to spell and give meself a good eddication. If I was a famous professor of Pig Science, I thought, surely no one would ever been mean to Mapadonet ever again! They'd be too intimmerdated by my cognitive prowess and amazing spellinn. But you know what? It didn't make no difference. And that's when I learned it don't matter what you are on the inside. Not to people. No one cares if you're a brilliant pig scientist. They only care if you gots a fancy white coat an' a piece of paper. Which were swiftly soiled with mud and eaten by a hungry pig respectively, I'll have you know. No one cares if you're the nicest, sweetest person a pig'll ever see. They only care that you smell terrible and are covered head to toe in mud and pig poopy. They'll always laff at you an' be mean an' call your pigs stupid an' useless. Always. Cause no one sees past Mapadonet's crusty outer surface ... *sob* No one. No one except the pigs. For the pigs are love, you see, and love is the most powerful thing in the universe. Stronger than fire. Stronger than hate. Even stronger than cats. Man if Matilda was still alive, she'd be throwin' so many cats at me right now. Right, anyway, all this "certainty" without any reason makes me very suspicious, Nabbers. What 'ave you done that makes you so much less murderworthy than me, eh? Maybe you've *hic* got plans to make my piggies into chouta! Come to think of it, I haven't seen Professor Pinkwaffle for ages... She'd never leave Mommy without tellin' me where to go ... it's been ages since I saw her sweet widdle face and brown button eyes and curly tail, covered with dung. Aww so cute. WHAT DID YOU *hiccups* DO TO HER, NABBERS? SHE WAS AN INNOCENT! SHE WEREN'T A PART OF THIS!

*hic hic hic* Aw man, I did so much to try to keep clean. I even *hic* washed my hands after handling the pigs or *hic hic HIC* touching raw eggs. I did *hic* everything you're supposed to do to not get sick! What haaaaaaaaaaaaaappened??? *Mad Mapadonet thinks* Oh no ... I'm having a flashback ... I shook someone's hand! Why did I do that? It's flu season! *hic hic* You're supposed to rub elbows! Oh, dumb, dumb Mapadonet! And now the pigs have *hic* too Their fat pink little bodies wobble with each hiccup. Their tails curl and uncurl as their bodies are *hic hic* wracked with convulsions. Oh god. They're dying all of them dying. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO *pig oinks* Well, that or they just have *hic*cups, I suppose.

*hic hic HIC hic* You gotta *hic* be careful showing fear around the pigs *hic hic hic hic* Aw man. *chorus of pigs quietly hiccuping*

Not that I really want to help you in any way, but technically I think you're supposed to retract in green first. *pig waves trotter helpfully*

damnation right I'm going to be casually flippant! Do you realize how silly pigs look when they take anything seriously? They look like nerds. Fat, pink little nerds.