That Butler, New Face

That Butler, Freeloading

"Yaaay, snooow~!" Finni sang happily as he ran around the snow covered lawn of Ciel's London townhouse. Mei-Rin was building a snowman, Bard was making snowballs, and Mister Tanaka sipped his tea while sitting inside the shelter of his little igloo.

"I made it too big, I did!" Mei-Rin cried as she struggled with the over-sized head she had made for the snowman.

"Adding stones'll make 'em just that much deadlier!" Bard said, smirking deviously, as he packed snow around some small stones he found. He was definitely going to get some payback on Sebastian and Chêne for pummeling him during their snowball fight at Ciel's birthday party the other day.

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[[Winter— in Great Britain, it is an ashen season covered by thick, heavy clouds. With the Jack the Ripper case resolved, the hum of daily life returned to London. That peace, however, proved but a brief respite—]]

Londoners murmured amongst themselves as, disturbed by the sight before them, as they crowded around outside a certain coffeehouse, the scene of the latest incident. Several men had been stripped down to their underwear, and then strung up from the storefront with rope so that they were all hanging upside down in a rather humiliating manner. Each of the had a letter from the culprit stuck on them, and it bore a strange symbol at the bottom for a signature... it looked rather like a stylized tongue.

[[There occurred a curious incident in which Anglo-Indians frequenting the Hindustani coffeehouse near Portman Square were attacked, stripped, and hung upside down from the roof.]]

A few police officers arrived on the scene and began to try to control the crowd that was forming as they secured the crime scene and set up a ladder so they could take the poor humiliated and beaten, but still living victims.

[[Afterward, in a rash of similar incidents, aristocrats and military personnel who had returned from India were like wise assaulted all over London. The same notice was affixed to all of the victims—

'Watch this wild, pathetic child of sloth and depravity. England is the motherland of the Devil, who robs and forces it's worthless, rotten, and ignorant culture on you instead! To all the idiots of the bitch-ruled land, you are the ones who deserve the vengeance of heaven!'

—So it said.]]

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A man shook with anger as he clutched the letter in his hand and stared at the strange symbol at the bottom of the page. The man was none other than Lord Randall, Commissioner of Scotland Yard.

"Another incident! This is the twentieth one!!" Randall roared angrily, vein mark throbbing on his forehead, as he crumpled up the note. "Haven't you been able to arrest the perpetrators yet, Abberline!?" he demanded of his subordinate.

"Sorry, Sir!!" Chief Inspector Abberline said earnestly, bowing profusely in apology to his superior police officer. Abberline was a ginger-haired man who had a mustache and a short goatee, and he was wearing a bowler hat.

"We let Jack the Ripper slip through our fingers, and that bloody brat snatched away our glory..." Randall grumbled angrily as a vein mark throbbed on his forehead.

"Ohh, do forgive me for being a brat," Ciel said drolly as he, Sebastian, and Chêne walked up to the coffeehouse. The police had already seen to it that the victims were taken to the hospital, but the ropes that had held them were still hanging from the roof. As far as Chêne could tell, there hadn't been any other sign of vandalism done to the store itself.

"Earl Phantomhive!" Lord Randall said, surprised. Chêne glanced at the crumpled letter in his hand and sweat dropped. Was that really how the Commissioner of Scotland Yard should treat important evidence found at a crime scene?