Festal dinner
Marie: A big table, covered with a lace tablecloth and served with best silver cutlery, is groaning with food. There were only three people at it: myself, my stepmother and uncle.
Task: Go through the study in ghosts mode.
You grip the ghostly newspaper in your hand. When your fingers pass it through, the room gets covered with mist so dense, that you can’t even see your own palm. You walk forward at random, afraid to hinge on some invisible obstacle.
With each step the mist is getting thinner, until the edge of the table emerges from it. Another step — and you can see silhouettes of people sitting around it. One of then, a stately man in the chair at the head of a table, can be no one else but Robert. Across from him is obviously Lynette and between them you recognize Marie’s figure.
Lynette: Traditionally the right to cut the Christmas pudding belongs to the head of the family. Will you be so kind as to do it, Robert?
Robert: Dear Ettie. I am surely the eldest in O'Leary family, but this is Samuel’s house, so I think it would be symbolic if at the year of her full age his only daughter would cut it.
Lynette: Sounds… revolutionary.
Robert: Rather progressive. You know I believe that only new ideas will lead our crown to prosperity. Marie, do you remember how you father was doing it the last time I came here for Christmas?
Marie: I think I do. He cut it into six pieces and said something good to everyone at the table: to me, to you and… Lynette.
You see the butler Stephen come through the door, carrying a plum pudding. It’s covered in flames and decorated with a Christmas holly branch, stuck into the very top of it.
Robert: Well, I am terribly hungry. I think it’s about time we start!
You completed the task and received some points of freedom and some tokens
Marie: That was the first time I had cut a Christmas pudding and asked for blessing for everyone at the table, including Lynette. Somehow it was easier to say it in uncle’s presence than I thought it would. And then we started looking for surprises. When they make a pudding, they put some small object into it on purpose — it’s something like fortune-telling. Lynette found a coin, uncle — a tiny anchor and I got a ring.
