The Hostess had forgotten how much she hated that clown. He had just opened her Doom trap - without even looking at the riddle, mind - and then displaced it. Right where she was. Good thing she had poison immunity of her own.

Focusing, the Hostess painstakingly finished reforming her body an stepped through the Void door on the left staircase.

((Boom! I'm back, darlings!))

She made a low growling noise as she stared at her Board. Where was her helper? Granted, he would be an awfully powerful variable, but at least that would be something!

Realizing her shoulderblades had gotten pushed out, the Hostess straightened and tried to calm down. She most certainly didn't need more Streets, thank you very much.

At the thought, she allowed herself to spend a few minutes arguing with herself about which Street she would even get. Anger? Impatience? Something from the L/O/L glitchpile? Restlessness?

...probably that last one.

Agh! She was getting distracted again! Stupid dead apathy, making her not care about staying focused... how long was resurrection going to take, anyways?!

On this Board were several different types of pieces - chess, checkers, Monopoly tokens, D&D figurines… each piece represented a person or force within her Party.

With a soft hum, she reached into a box of figurines and pulled out what looked like a miniature clown. “You’ll do,” she murmured as she placed him at the edge of the Board. After a moment, she picked him back up and moved him closer to the center - Spanky would be rather powerful, after all.

Just as soon as he joined in.

After consideration, she moved a few other pieces around - the White Queen, the Black Knight, the Iron, a wooden bell… it was hard to tell whether this affected anything or was just her way of keeping track.

Once she was done moving the pieces around, the Hostess took out a deck of cards and looked them over. “Not bad,” she muttered grudgingly. “I do have to give you some credit.”

Finally, she put the cards down and began to pace. Being ‘dead’ was boring. She wanted to be out there meddling, not observing! Okay, sure, she was still meddling. But she wasn’t out there, dropping more clues, talking to her guests… just sitting in her void, keeping her Board up to date and looking at her cards.

Being passive was so dull.

This time, instead of the lights coming back on like the flick of a switch, a fog dissipates from around the fixtures. Once things become visible again - which was about half of the normal light level - you can make out the figure of a body, a female. When the light returns to normal, well…

It’s Calliope.

That… that cannot possibly be right. She was just doing a circuit of the room, wasn’t she?

Wait, no. She was dragging the Cryptographer to the Garnet Ghast.

Or was she laughing at Sapphire?

No, she was messing with Mister Turkey.

No, wait, it was Yatagarasu.

Oh gosh. Where was she? She couldn’t have been in five places at once. It just wouldn’t have been possible.

But you look around and you don’t see her anywhere save for over the railing of a balcony, not only hung but impaled on a spear of some kind. The lights couldn't have been obscured for that long... and you heard nothing.

So what happened?

After slipping away from the Crimson Woman, the Hostess maneuvered expertly through the crowd, never touching a single person. To anyone bothering to keep an eye out, she seemed to be making a clockwise circuit around the room, not that you had any idea why she would be doing this… unless, of course, you received something.

The Musician had gotten to the party on time, indeed, with time to spare. Her carefully-laid plan to be the perfect socialite had lasted for the time it took her to make two key realizations: One, that she'd completely misunderstood the concept of "fashionable lateness", and two, she knew the chamber orchestra's cellist. The two had talked, griped about composers and divas, and the Musician had completely missed the start of the party proper.

Now, as she stood and took in the crowd, she wondered if she hadn't underdressed.

The Musician wore a simple gown, white silk dropping from a high Empire waist almost to the floor. Her jewelry was similarly simple, a silver treble clef resting in the hollow of her throat and, for those with quick eyes, a matching silver bass clef on a chain around her ankle. She was accompanied by her own music; an array of silver bells and steel chimes hung from her braided and coiled hair and sang in key with the orchestra. Eyes the color of violin strings sparked behind a simple dove-gray domino mask; while most of her face was clearly visible some art or artifice obscured her identity and left her familiar but anonymous.

Moments later, you hear the clacking of heels on marble, and feel a sharp tug as space seems to rearrange itself. A spotlight comes on, shining at a balcony connected to the main floor by two staircases, one curving along either side of the room.

In the center of the spotlight stands a woman in a suit - a white shirt covered by a deep red vest, with black slacks and a black suit jacket (though the cuffs were the same red as the vest). She also wears what looks like it could be a small red cravat, tall black boots, gloves - white at the fingers, less opaque the farther up they go - and a mask. This mask is black with red trim below the eyes, and has a smattering of garnets towards its top which glimmer a bloody crimson in the spotlight, but is otherwise rather plain. It does, however, leave her bright green eyes unconcealed.

What surprises you more than anything is her hair. Gone was the long, mostly-straight hair you had seen for the past six months; now, the chocolate-colored hair is cut just short of her shoulders, and is more wavy than anything. You also take a moment to notice that she decided that bright red lipstick was a good idea... how typical of Calliope.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” she announces after a moment, “welcome to my birthday masquerade! I thank all of you for coming, though I do realize that we still have a few guests still on their way. Please, enjoy yourselves.”

Her grin at that point unsettles you. The lights come back on, but you barely notice.

"After all, parties don't last forever."

He was a tall and imposing figure, with a simple black and white tux adorning his lanky body, making him look elegant and poised as opposed to awkward. The only defining features were a bird mask with a long portruding beak covering the upper half of his face above his mouth and a long, almost comical, top hat. An obnoxious grin was clearly displayed as he walked, pausing once as if searching for something in particular before continuing further into the room.

She tugged at the silk of her dress, her self-consciousness easing slightly as she saw the myriad of fancy costumes in the room. She'd worried she'd overdone it, with the ballgown the color of wine and the silver tracing the bodice and down to the hem in a curlicue pattern. A black, satiny mask covered the upper half of her face, and was touched with the same silver pattern as her dress. Her gloves, too, were black and satiny. Her dishwater-blonde hair was pinned back (with ruby pins, no less) so it fell in a waterfall of curls down to her shoulder blades.

She had a secret.

Taking a deep breath, she stepped further into the party, looking for any familiar faces in the crowd.

He was squat and round, wide-shouldered and bumpy, padding in awkwardly, bumping against guests and knocking poorly shined shoes against table legs and saying 'Phwor, pardon!' He resembled a bowling ball in both dignity and appearance. This was a fact that he was deeply aware of, and he took advantage of it. The bowling ball theme for his mask, he thought, was a brilliant plan, and the only thing that could possibly go wrong would be a chance meeting with somebody else, or, even worse, a chance meeting with exactly ten somebody elses themed after bowling pins. The havoc would be unstoppable, maybe moreso because he was terrible at bowling. The mask covered his head, went over and around and stopped right at his mouth. He was grinning like he had seen something funny. He was grinning like a wiseguy punk who found many things funny. The jacket was red, the shirt was black, the tie was white. He had seen Billy Joel wear something similar, and it had looked very good on Billy Joel. How good it looked on him was a subjective matter that he, for now, had let slip from his mind. He was still very proud about the 'bowling ball' theme. So he stood there, looked around, and grinned. He knew his friends. He'd recognise them in a second. All he needed to do was wait for all these blithely wandering strangers to move out the way, give him a clear path of sight. That was all. He grinned like he had seen something funny.

A teenaged... person (for their gender was indistinguishable) nervously slipped through the doors, clearly not wanting to be there very much. Their delicately cut suit was made of complimentary shades of white and blue, fading into each other where the colors met, and shot through with silver and black. The pants and jacket hung loosely off the person's slim frame, and the shirt was made of a flowing gray material. Their mask was an intricate affair of dark blue and black feathers flowing up from ornately filigreed black metal that covered most of the person's face except for the bottom quarter. The exposed part of their face didn't reveal much about them. Short, fluffy gray-brown hair could be espied on the back of their head where the feathers stopped. Their eyes behind the mask seemed to be all different colors; blue, then green, then grey, even brown. This person, after coming in, found the nearest unoccupied wall space and stood there fidgeting, obviously impatient to be gone.

An adult slipped into the building, dressed in a formal white suit and wearing a wolf mask. His dark hair poked out from the sides of the mask, and he had a wooden cane with a dragon head for a handle. "Tonight should be fun." His brown eyes danced around the room, taking in everyone, seeking someone in particular.

Though you wouldn't be able to tell behind his mask, the man was smiling. He pulled his black cloak close around himself as he entered. Upon seeing the crowd, he decided to move to the walls, where there was less chance of accidentally bumping into someone else.

The Concerned One entered soon after, dressed in a simple yet formal black suit and red tie, with an undecorated half-mask covering everything above the tip of his nose. His dark hair was shaved on the sides but long enough to curl a bit on top, but no other features were noticeable. He looked around the party scene, clearly uncomfortable for some reason; an observant person could have heard him mutter, "Here we go," before he walked further into the room.

((Here goes nothing!))

Someone slips into the house.

Dressed in a suit the colour of wine, the person's face was almost completely hidden behind an intricate clockwork sculpture that slowly ticked and shifted about. It was quite honestly a miracle how it didn't break the person's neck, based on how complex it was.

He, for he was male, moved to mingle with the crowd.

The doors swing open, and the diminutive figure of a classy young lady in a crimson Victorian-style dress makes her way into the party. She pauses at the door, adjusting her mask- a black, feathered affair that covers only the top half of her face but does nothing to conceal her mouth or the color of her hair- medium length, brown and spilling down her back in a low pony tail. As she raises her arms, it becomes apparent that a pair of wings in the same color of scarlet, are part of the dress, attached to her wrists- when she moves her arms, they move with her. "Well," she says, grinning. "This should certainly be interesting."

((I'm probably doing this wrong.))