Clue 1

Evil Sugar and I had a fantastic time executing the Scottish play (and the players) for the gummies' entertainment a short time ago.

Little did I know, that beneath my very nose, the dastardly red and white teams were abusing my hospitality, removing IMPORTANT HEALTH MATERIALS as well as leaving clues.

I didn't find out about that part of the visit until later, upon receiving these:



The front of the card said: "It begins. You have one week to complete the search. The gummies have taken something. Your first clue is where the missing object used to be."



The back of the card said:
Mrs. Peacock: "Yvette, is there a little girls' room in the hall?"
Yvette: "Oui, oui, madame."
Mrs. Peacock: "No, I just I want to powder my nose, thank you."
[odd symbol]

The gummies had TAKEN STUFF.

My first thought was, this means war.

My second thought was that the next Clue must be, appropriately enough, where my Clue DVD used to be!



But no. I took all the DVDs down, looked all over the shelf, and found nothing. I returned to the clue.

What about that weird symbol in the corner? What the hell was that? And - oooooo! Some of the letters were darker than others! Perhaps a CODE?



This was all the letters. Geez, there were a lot of vowels in there. Could you even make a sentence, with that many vowels in it?

Just then, Meredithian called. I sent her an image of the letters. She pointed out they were all the letters in FOEcakes.

Ah.

Okay, so just some team spirit showing up, not a clue. Back to the drawing board. Funny symbol, quote from Clue about bathrooms... aHAH!

I tore apart my bathroom. Medicine cabinet, stack of towels, bunches of toilet paper rolls, cabinet with toothpaste and hair dryer and deoderant in it.

In the end, I was left with just a messy bathroom.

I went to bed.

The next morning I found the gummies had taken pity on me, and sent me some additional clues:



OF COURSE! RICOLA! That's What the symbol was!

The gummies had broken into my travel stash of EmergenC and Ricola! Fiendish! I bolted to my kitchen and grabbed the bag of travel remedies:



Dumped it out on the counter:



Hm. No clue. I dug around inside the Ricola bag:



Still no clue. Huh.

Then I realized, I HAD MORE RICOLA! Back to the bathroom!

I opened the cabinet:



Reached back to my hoard of Ricola and removed it:



Revealing A CLUE!

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Clue 2



The back of the smack pack is out of whack.



"Frankly, Scarlet, I don't give a damn."

...smack pack? I googled.

AHA! My BEER! I headed over to my fridge, which is luckily much emptier than my medicine cabinet (this, unfortunately, says a lot about me). I opened the door:



Moved the water aside:



Checked underneath the beer:



And then inside of it:



(Part where I removed the beer from the case and shook it wildly not pictured.)

Nothing. I thought about the quote for a while. Were the gummies communicating using Gone With the Wind, now? (I'm not sure why it took me forever to realize that this was also a quote from Clue... I feel like I had low blood sugar for half this praxis or something.)

Hm. Smack pack, smack pack, smack pack. What could - OH!

Of course! I had lent Evil my season pass to rollerderby a while back, and the gummies would have had access to it!



And within, the clue.

Clue 3



Finding the next clue is as easy as 1 2 3: "It was true she was a bit of a snob and obssessed with ritual and etiquette..."



"It's a matter of life after death. Now that he's dead, I have a life."

You know how someone gives you a clue and suddenly you're certain you've figured it out, that you totally nailed it, and your brilliance is unstoppable? And then you're wrong? Running theme here, in case you hadn't noticed.

I rushed over to my etiquette book, and found nothing. Did the shaking thing. Still nothing.

Damn.

Meredithian, who at this point was becoming an unpaid consultant, said she thought the "It was true she was a bit of a snob and obssessed with ritual and etiquette..." sounded like a quote from something. Huh. Now that she mentioned it, it totally did. Google!



Voila! Mortal Engines, p.123.

AH. THAT'S what the, "easy as 1 2 3" was about. I went to the bookshelf and snagged Mortal Engines, which I had also recently lent to Evil, and to which the gummies would have had access:



And, like a charm, here's what I found on page 123:

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Clue 4



The next clue is above the empanadas and coffee, but below the table.



"Why would he want to kill you in public?"

As soon as I read about the empanadas, I knew. I would have to venture outside of the house, into public, to follow the fiendish gummy trail. A local coffee house that Evil and I had often met at had both empanadas, tables, and the ability to put tables above the empanadas:



This place has great empanadas, by the way. Not to mention a seating area suspended above said empanada case!



I snagged some coffee and empanadas of my own, and took the stairs up to the tob, where I was met with a bunch of tables.



I started by kneeling and peering beneath the tables, but that was not so thorough. Eventually I ended up lying beneath them, to make sure I hadn't missed anything. The first table was not so useful:



The second table was remarkably clean:



And the third one had something beneath it, but not anything I was looking for:



Unfortunately, Chaparral Studios could not help me now.

At this point I had checked every table not occupied by a human being. It was time to start making friends. There were two women, each at a different table, and a kid at his own table. The adults had flipped on their 'pretend everything is normal' scripts from the start, and had been ignoring me. The kid, on the other hand, had been watching me like a hawk from the moment I started sticking my head beneath things.

Emerging from beneath the last table left me a few feet away from him, so I smiled and explained a friend had left me clues, and there was one beneath one of the tables up here.

And thank you, little kid, for at that moment offering to let me look beneath your table, so I did not have to come up with some way of not sounding like a creepy person and causing your mother to descend on me with knives.

And there it was!



I'd like to give a shout out to that kid, right here. You were cool.

Clue 5



The final clue is stashed away in GummyLand. Any member of the white team can tell you where.



It's not just a game anymore.

GummyLand - the last fortress? I was close! I could feel it!

Through methods I will not disclose here, I journeyed to GummyLand. They were ready for me - as if they had planned for my arrival. As if they were waiting.

I was so happy that I'd found the last clue! The white team had it:



The key to finding the final clue is on the back of the first four clues...

Well, they were all quotes from Clue, that much I had figured - aha! Evil had a DVD shelf, nearby!



And there it was! The Clue DVD. The end of the trail! I opened it, and was confronted not with the end to my quest, but with yet another clue!



Time for swimming with the fishies...



Seven Suspects, Six Weapons, Five Bodies, and Three Endings

Well, well, well. One last clue. Okay, so the quote was just one of the taglines from the movie Clue, and wasn't much help. Fish. Fish, fish, fish. I sat down to think. That's when I noticed this:



The kitchen is a designated player killing area.

Uh oh. I proceeded to look everywhere I could that did not involve entering the kitchen.

Not here:



Or here:



I checked the fridge, because it could be opened while standing in the dining room, but found nothing. Finally, I had to go within the kitchen. I knew that the end of my quest lay there, so no matter the danger, I had to continue on.

Big mistake.



And then the little bastards killed me.

* * *

OR DID THEY!?

That's how it could have happened. But how about this?

"Time for swimming with the fishies"... what could it mean?

I looked everywhere for fish-based things. I checked the chopsticks with the fish on them. I checked behind a picture of fish. I checked a mango.

Nothing.

Hm.

Then I looked over to the shelf of DVDs once again... and VOILA!



Finding Nemo!

I opened it, and found the art that the gummies had so carefully made from the fiendishly stolen health materials!



And, well... it was kind of pretty. Perhaps I would only have a small war with them...


* * *

OR WOULD I!?

That's how it could have happened. But how about this?

A few days later, I realized that Evil Sugar had posted a new clue in her praxis - but the meaning was unclear. Before I could fully come to grips with it, I was accused of murdering a number of gummies!

Warlike I might be, but coldhearted murder? How could this be possible? I knew I was innocent.

I journeyed once again to GummyLand to clear my name. It was here I discovered that an amazing gift waited for me.

Hell yeah, gummies.

Also I was later cleared of the murders. So, bonus!

* * *

Evil Sugar has her own version of these events, which you should check out.