Skill 10

[thinkoutsidethebox]

Detective proclamation. Form of a slice of bread.

This is an extremely meta Umineko skill and therefore requires a somewhat complicated writeup.

The detective proclamation is basically Erika declaring herself to be the detective in red! She does this on the game board world, which is normally not affected by meta rules like red truth.

"......Stand back. I can't investigate the scene like this."
"If anyone needs to do something like that, we'll do it! The police will do it! Like hell you have the right to shame everyone's remains more than they already have been!!"
"Detective's authority. ......The detective has the right to inspect all crime scenes. Stand back, Ushiromiya Battler. This is an official right of this game, which the human side has acknowledged."
Those words, which seemed to be utterly ridiculous at first, ......were words of power which had come from a world on a much higher plane than the one they were in.
Battler was thrown back by an unseen power and landed on his butt.
Struck silent by this quiet intensity, ......nobody was able to prevent Erika from entering the room, suffocated by this bizarre atmosphere...
".........Don't worry. My goal is not to profane the dignity of the deceased. It's not like I want to peek into something as disgusting as a slit through someone's neck. ......I want to know something completely different."
"In other words, who committed these murders. .........Doctor Nanjo. And everyone else. ......Particularly the first one to discover them, Battler-san. .........There are many things I want to question you about, so I ask for your cooperation."
"L, ......like I said, by what authority are you doing this...?!"
"Because I am the detective."
Battler couldn't argue against this incomprehensible nonsense.
......No, ...he wasn't permitted to argue.
It was a restriction...placed on pieces.

Functionally, it means she is unquestionably playing the role of "the detective" in a mystery. This has certain benefits and restrictions, particularly in a classic mystery governed by Knox's rules!

A (probably not entirely exhaustive) list of implications of the detective proclamation:

• She is absolutely not the culprit. (This means she can't murder anyone.)
  
• No one is permitted to hinder her investigation.
  
• Her observations are perfect. Nothing can be hidden or faked well enough to deceive the detective.
  
  • She will always find all clues.
    
  • If she inspects a body and believes it's dead, it can't be faked.
    
  • If she looks for something and doesn't find it, it's not there to be found.
    
  • If she's listening for something and doesn't hear it, it didn't happen.
• She is obligated to have an objective point of view. She can't intentionally report falsehoods to mislead the reader. (She can mislead suspects, though!)

Note that like speaking in red or blue text, this isn't a magic skill, it's a meta skill! This skill was locked on her registry until she had all the mundane skills to support it, including knowledge of the mystery genre, acting and manipulating people, knowledge of puzzles, and eidetic memory. It's a restriction on how the story goes, but only involving things that are within her actual abilities.

However! There are also meta restrictions on this skill!

• Canonically she can't use the detective proclamation without meta approval, so fortunately this translates easily into Aather terms—she won't be able to make the proclamation unless all the players involved in a situation approve.
  
• And, of course, there's no detective if it's not a mystery, so the "situation" has to be a mystery! Ideally a murder.

...Functionally I don't expect this skill to be usable pretty much ever. But it could happen.