'knock knock' - A Letter, October 5th 2004

"Hope I'm not too late...".

Noticing the door is slightly ajar our intrepid adventurer pushes the door, and it eerily creaks open. "YOOOOHOOOOoooooooo..!!", not surprisingly, the whole house reverberates "ANYONE HOME..!". The silence is deafening, but then a jumbo jet would be like silence in the wake of that announcement.
"I wonder if this is the right house..?"
"Still talking to yourself we see",
"It was retorical...", she replies, and gives herself an icy glare in the hallway mirror, "Now unless you have something worthwhile to contribute, go back to sleep...".
"We would think someone who uses as much punctuation as you, err, me, hmm, us? nevermind, well you would think you would be more punctual"
"Very amusing", the temperature falls, "NOT.!! Anyway, I'm not late, I was, as ever unavoidably delayed."
"Oh LOL!", for a second her innner voice reflects as to whether it can actually laugh out loud, but it cartainly tries, "well that is one way of describing it. Maybe you should tell the shrink that next time you see him. Oh and also, ask him which is the correct term, "you", "me" or "us" when talking to mysel... ourselv... you... oh bother!", and with that, the silence just grew louder.

Perusing her surroundings, our intrepid adventurer concludes that this is indeed the correct address - shelves here and there hanging at odd angles, cupboard doors not quite square, laminate flooring - all obvious signs of the amateur DIY'er.
"Yes this is definately the right place. You can't fake this level of DIY".

As she scans around her environs, her eye is drawn to a spot of blood on the laminate near her feet, and another, a few inches further on, and another, and another, heading in the direction of what appears to be the kitchen. A few more splashes in the kitchen sink and around the tap. She concludes that someone obviously was trying to clean a wound.
"Hmm, judging by the amount of blood, prolly a 2d4 hit", she ponders out loud. The trail leads away from the kitchen and through a rear door and out to the driveway at the side of the house. The acrid smell of exhaust fumes heavy with burnt oil hang in the air.
"Someone left in a hurry", she says to the gods, as her inner voice continues to run around a mobius loop of self discovery.

Back in the kitchen, in one corner, an old Amiga 500, attached to an old flickering screen, lies strewn with paper.
"Upgraded the PC at last I see", and taking a blank piece of the debris from the corner, writes a few words upon it, folds it in half, and writes "to J. from A.", and places it tent like in the middle of the kitchen table.

She scans around the kitchen, smiles, and then turns in the direction of the front door and leaves the house by the way she came in, not noticing that the trail of blood leads through the front door and into the garden, and seems to originate in the vicinity of a power tool. If she had noticed the trail, and had time to inspect the power tool, she would of found it to be an Unholy Hedge Trimmer +1/+3 vs Unwitting DIY'ers. It would of appeared to have been hastily discarded, quite near to a hedge - or at least some kind of shrubbery - that had been under going some kind of weird topiary... but not quite finished.

A.