VIDEO BEGINS TRANSCRIBING — — —
“Alright, Jujubees’, welcome back.”
Judy stands in the main room of her grandma's lodge, though the video is shot from a different angle this time. The box throne is now off to one corner of the room, and the back wall with the mounted animals and weapons is completely out of frame. Instead, the camera points toward one of the side walls of the lodge. Where space had been made for a huge chalkboard that reaches almost to the slanted ceiling and dominates the scene. A few boxes are just in frame beneath the chalkboard to use as a shelf to hold some chalk and an eraser.
Judy has also changed her look, Her hair is now pulled back into a high ponytail, and she is wearing a well-fitted maroon pantsuit. The look is far more professional than before, and from her first words it is obvious she means business.
“I’ve decided the best way to approach my grandma’s last request is to treat it like any other cold case we’ve cracked on the channel.” She flashes a confident smile to the audience,“I’ll go over what that means for the new viewers, though if you’ve been here for a while I would still stick around to listen. I’ve changed a few things, because unlike most of the cases we’ve done, this one is personal.”
Judy almost glares into the camera, as if daring one of her subscribers to disagree. “I will be seeing this case all the way to the end, whether you guys are watching or not. I know this is nothing like what I usually do, and I am probably going to need all of your help to get to the bottom of this. So, I made some calls to some old friends of the channel to keep it interesting”
Judy puts a hand up, as if to stall any comments from the audience, “I know you guys like it best when I try to make it as far as I can into the case on my own. But I think you’ll enjoy watching the team I've put together. First, on the scene to help us out is Fumushu.”
She gestures to the chalkboard next to her. “ Would you like to say hi?”
At this, the chalkboard draws out a picture on its own with a quick scribble of chalk. A cute chibi anime girl with messy hair and a bun takes shape on the board with an enthusiastic “Hello!” written in a speech bubble next to it.
Judy explains, “Fumushu has helped us out before, mostly drawing animations. With how insane this project is turning out though, I thought I might need some visual aids to help us understand whats going on. Not to mention Fumu's general expertise in art, which has already proved invaluable. But more on that later.”
There is another quick chalk scribble sound effect and the chibi pumps her fist and her speech bubble changes to say, “Excited to be here to help!”
“Next person here to help out is Timothy, my editing wizard, who apparently lives here in Colorado. When he saw my last video he offered to come up here in person to help sort through my grandmas junk,” Judy pauses again to let Tim introduce himself.
A light blue holographic square scans into existence in the corner of the screen, labeled editor's box. Inside the box, in the same holographic style, a figure in a deep robe, nods to the audiences with the caption ‘Hello there’ before winking off the screen in much the same way it arrived.
Judy speaks up again, “There is one more person I called out here, but they haven’t gotten back to me yet. So I’ll keep who they are a secret, I’ll give you guys a hint. It's someone who you have been begging me to get back on the channel.”
The chalkboard changes again, the chibi character getting redrawn smaller in the corner with glasses and a ruler, her speech bubble changing to say, “Now that everyone has met the team, let's get into this!”
Judy smiles up at Fumushu on the chalkboard and agrees“ Absolutely Fumu, But first let me get all the new people on the same page.” She launches into a well practiced introduction. “To treat this like a real cold case, we start by looking for inconsistencies and insufficient evidence in the records of the initial investigation. These are the areas where it was most likely something slipped through the cracks, and are our best chance of finding a new lead where the trail has gone cold.”
Judy reaches off-screen and grabs a legal notepad. “ I’ve gotten a few of these written down already, let's list them off.” Next to her, Fumushu is animated. Taping on the chalkboard with the ruler, and recording each point into a bullet point on as she does so.
Inconsistencies
* The assumption of magic? To accept this story as true, we must assume that magic is real and has somehow gone fully unrecorded in the modern era. I’ve solved a lot of ‘unsolvable’ cold cases, but surely someone else would have recorded the existence of ‘magic’ before me?
* The Grandma’s Initial letter says all of her diaries are in the Golden Box. We found it, but there is only one diary?
* Almost all the documents are written in English with Arabic numerals. Even if they were translated to English at a later date, we have found no indication of any awkward translations or any of the original documents in their native language. This is exceedingly unlikely.
* There are no dates on any of the official documents, this culture was supposedly as advanced as us technologically, and had access to magic that bent the rules of the universe. None of its documents are dated? I call BS.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
* (added in post by editor Tim) I am unsure about the amount of stuff, if we believe the account that Mrs Trinaday traveled there with nothing but the clothes on her back. How did she bring all of this stuff back?
“That accounts for all the inconsistencies the team here has found so far. If any Jujubees watching this or reading attached documents finds something we missed, comment and let us know.”
Judy frowns and flips the page of the legal pad to the one below it. “ Now I really wish I could end it here and go right into investigating these inconsistencies. But we also have to account for points of the story we have insufficient evidence to judge. Those things in this case are the unexplainable items in the lodge that support Grandma’s story. Until these mysteries can be disproven or solved, they stand in support of Grandma’s fantasy magic.”
On the chalkboard, Fumushu’s chibi appears next to Judy with a pouty expression and a text bubble reading, “Hey! Don’t be like that Juju, I believe your grandma!”
Judy looks back at the board in disbelief, “Seriously, Fumu? This is insane, full stop. What in the world could possibly prove magic?”
Fumushu responds, chalk being written then erased from a speech bubble as the chibi emotes, “I’ve been right here looking at the same stuff you have Juju. From an artist's perspective, some of this just can’t be explained.”
Her chibi is erased then redrawn in a clear part of the board with a serious expression, “Look some of the pictures of the wall trophies,” as she mentions them the chalk ruler is animated taping on the board and a picture is edited in each place she taps.
“All these pictures are key points on just one out of the dozen or so trophies that have been stuffed and mounted. The plaque on this one calls it ‘The Basilisk’s Head’. If this is real, the snake was proportionally bigger than any snake ever recorded on Earth! Best guess puts it at nearly two feet in diameter, nearly two times bigger than an anaconda.” She taps on the picture, pointing out a measurement on the jaw, then jumps as a hissing noise is edited in. The chibi’s face morphs to one of panic, and it runs away from the picture. Face-first into the frame of the other picture behind her, a close up shot of the top of the snake's head.
The little chibi plops down to the ground, her eyes drawn as little spirals, glasses knocked onto the floor, and a big cartoon bump on her head. Soon enough, though, she shakes if off and stands back up, her face returning to the serious one as she resumes the lecture.
“By everything, I can evaluate, the thing is real. Taxidermy is really hard to fake convincingly. I have… no idea how you’d even begin to get the scales to look like this. Now keep in mind it's not just this snake, there are a dozen other insanely well done animal heads mounted on the walls here. To fake any one of these, it would take an absolute master at specifically faking taxidermy! And it would cost a fortune. I’ve asked some sculptors that I know, they say just one of these would take 6 months to a year to do. Costing at least 100,000 USD some of them said that if the artist was famous enough it could go up to several million! Again, there are like twelve of these!” Fumushu finishes the lecture, then is erased pictures and all, before being drawn in next to Judy with a smug expression, “So what do you think about that!?”
Judy just sighs, “We’ll add it to the list. Tim, if you could put the mysteries list up on the board behind me?” she then turns to face directly to the camera, “While you guys take a look through that, let me take a moment to talk about this video’s sponsor…”
As she speaks, the list is drawn up on the chalkboard next to the previous one. Being projected line by line as a hologram before fading away to regular chalk.
Mysteries
* The large page (Yellow Box) as well as a few other documents (Cardboard # 55) are written in an unrecognizable language, and mostly untranslated. Why are these different from the rest? What do they say? We can confirm they aren't any recorded language. Do any conlang communities recognize the text? Is it translatable?
* What is the device in the yellow box for? Who made it? It has a maker's mark but an internet search shows no results.
Makers Mark [https://i.imgur.com/cDnTcSq.jpeg]
* Internet searches for Grandma’s full name are weird. They confirm her missing/ presumed dead through her 20s to 40s. Then there are a few small articles of her being alive, and a few mentions of some crazy nonprofit she founded for interdimensional travelers. After that? Radio silence till her death. If this is a hoax, it seems to have cost her a crazy amount of money, and been planned before Judy was born.
* (Added by Fumushu) The art on display here is insane, there are a few oil paintings made with seemingly no tools. No brush strokes or other indication of how it was applied, like a printed picture but using paint instead of ink. None of my art friends have any idea how you’d even start to make something like that.
* (Added by Fumushu) The taxidermy is seriously cool. If these aren't real animals, whoever made these have to be one of the greatest sculptors of our time. Bad taxidermy isn't too hard but making something that looks this real? No way. I want to get a better expert to look at these.
* (Added in post by editor Tim) The lodge itself is odd, I’m not sure where we get power from. There was a blackout in our area of Manitou recently, a landslide took out some power poles, but we never noticed.
“... Now back to the video, if you still need to read the list I’ll give you some time here to pause,” then she walks out of the camera frame leaving the chalkboard alone and quiet. Filled only with circles of chalk dust from all of Fumushu’s redrawing, and the two lists.
Still off-screen we can hear Judy grunt as she picks something up,“ Now that we’ve properly set up this cold case, it's time to dig deeper.” As she speaks she begins to walk back into frame, we can see the top of her head over the back of the cardboard throne.
“I’ve got something to tell you Jujubes, we’ve already found an answer to one of the contradictions.” she walks out from behind the chair, a large cube cradled in her arms.
“We were right, the yellow box was not the golden box,” She sets the golden cube on the boxes stacked just under the chalkboard. “This is.”
As she sets the box down, Fumushu’s chibi is scribbled out onto the chalkboard as if sitting on top of it, a question mark in a thought bubble over her head.
Judy stretches out her arms to get some blood flow back now that they are free from the weight of the box. “Unfortunately, this gives us no answers, just more questions. The biggest one? How does a solid golden cube have twenty years worth of Grandma's journals inside of it?”
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