*MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD*
Tsuruya's Challenge- the third short story of "The Intuition of Haruhi Suzumiya" (novel 11)The SOS Brigade are in the club room after school. The nameless mystery club blonde girl who was in the last story (Seven Wonders Overtime) is now named simply as "T". The reason is revealed towards the end though.
Koizumi and Nagato are having a conversation with T in one corner of the room about their favourite mystery novels, whilst Mikuru is agonising over which move to make in a tabletop game with Kyon. T had dropped by the clubroom just to hand a borrowed book back to Nagato, but struck up a conversation whilst being there.
Haruhi finally enters the room having been stuck in a beautification committee meeting that she somehow found herself in. They get an email from Tsuruya to the SOS brigade email address (which Asahina has recorded the line "you've got mail" for). She is not in school due to having to run errands for her family, so that's why she's emailing. However Kyon reads that the attachment is a challenge set for them.
With her best Tsuruya impression, Haruhi reads the attachment. It's a story that is presumably about one of Tsuruyas adventures whilst travelling around the world with her father. At a fancy party where she had to wear a fancy ball gown, she met a girl equally dressed up and bored, so they decided to go to the hotel tennis court and start volleying, completely dressed up. In the locker rooms after their showers they discovered that one of the dresses was bugged, so they dressed up in the tennis clothes that were initially provided by the hotel staff when they got the balls and rackets, and then headed to the lobby. They discarded the bug on some passerby and headed to her hotel room where they spent a lot of time chatting. Eventually they hid under the bed in anticipation of being tracked. But the next thing she knew she was drifting off and eventually found herself in bed properly with the other girl not there.
The club members can't figure out where the challenge lies with this passage, but then Haruhi assumes that the trick is that the reader assumes that it was about Tsuruya in the first place. They deliberate it some more and realise that the trick to the story is that it simply took place in her past. A second email arrives to confirm this. Tsuruya simply wanted to share her story from 7 years ago to a bored audience. Who better than the SOS brigade?
Attached in the second email is a second story that took place in the fall of last year, also when she was abroad and also with the same friend again. The story is about ditching their parents and minders from GPS trackers, taking a hot springs together and joining in on a local autumn festivals' grape stomping competition.
At the end of the story they print out copies for themselves and read it again for clues to whatever mystery they should find within the text. Mikuru chimes up to ask why would they hop aboard a train if they were going to a party via car?
They also mention something about how Tsuruya speaks without quotation marks, much like the author of this series does.
They all realise that the minder is a guy, and they gave him the slip when they aboarded the train.
Tsuruyas last email comes through once passage 2 is deducted. Apparently the GPS trackers became so advanced that they are now invisible to the naked eye. The technologies being pushed to their limits created a breakthrough of computing power on a DNA scale, and Tsuruyas new party she had to attend with her father this time was in celebration of this new discovery. All because they had to make GPS trackers smaller and smaller to keep tabs on 2 teenage girls. Anyway they meet a guy at this party who could possibly be a suitor to the friend of Tsuruya. In this story though she is named only once as being "Shouko". This suitor is assaulted in a nearby room to the party hall, and it's Tsuruyas' question to the SOS Bridge as to whom it was.
They try to work out the culprits name based off of what he said in his 'final moments' using wordplay for the English of 'Do Not Ingest' and 'Do Not Swallow'.
Tsuruya sends over a few more hints and it seems Haruhi and Koizumi work it out.
Eventually Nagato stares at Kyon to get his attention, then adjusts her head to look at T. Kyon doesn't get it, so she uncharacteristically gets up and sits at the table and stares at T some more. Kyon finally gets it. T is in on it. Kyon gets up and shouts "HAH!" at T's face. T's mobile phone starts chiming so she answers it and puts it on speaker. It's Tsuruya. Kyon realised that T was bugged by a listening devise being used by Tsuruya (a hair pin), and that T herself is actually the unnamed girl of stories 1 and 2.
It comes into conversation regarding the nickname of 'T', and that it was decided upon from her classmates due to her confusing real name, which is actually "Ottilie Adrastea Hohenstaufen-Baumgartner". There is even a 'von' in there which she omitted. Lol. In Germany it is pronounced "ogh-till-e-air" (in English as "Ogh-tilly").
Mikuru makes some bad tea which both Kyon and Haruhi consume. She forgot to add sugar. After that its Ok.
After that they think that something still isn't quite right. After some more deductive work T admits that stories 2 and 3 are somewhat made up. Story 2 is embellished. The bit about the festival is actually world famous. Story 3 is mostly true up until it becomes a 'murder mystery'. After this it's purely made up.
The planning and development of this whole so called 'mystery' was actually derived from the mystery club president, with T and Tsuruya supplying the ideas and supervising. The SOS brigade were actually test subjects for the mystery club's cultural festival event. So from this they will tweak the stories to iron out the issues to make it harder to solve when used for real at the culture fest.
One last thing to solve was the first sentence of the 3rd story; "Where am I?"
Haruhi has a hunch that Tsuruya is close by, and sure enough the door bursts open with Tsuruya at the door, back from her family excursions. Turns out she just made it home before sending the emails, getting dressed in her school uniform to join the gang and actually setting out towards school the end of her 'challenge'.
After the day's finale, Kyon and Itsuki escape from the escapades of the club room just so that Koizumi can do his usual spiel at the end of these stories, probably just because the author wants him too. Again, if they are so worried about Haruhi's unconsciousness, why not seek out Yasumi for help? The only thing of relevance from this conversation between the two guys was that Koizumi thinks Kuyoh Suoh is still a threat, but that needs to be figured out between Kyon, Yuki and Kuyoh at a later date, (and might involve the metal rod from the treasure map story).
Back in the club room, Kyon asks Asahina what she was staring so intently at during a passage of episode 3. Turns out it's the bit about DNA Computing. She couldn't say anything to Kyon with Haruhi in the room, so she just puts her fingers to her lips to let him know that its 'classified'.
Kyon wonders about these new listening system & GPS tracker technologies that are most likely embedded within both T and Tsuruya, naked to the eye. Maybe the hair pin was a decoy? He then wonders whether Nagato was interfering with them when she was staring at the two girls earlier, as a way of sending their parents into a spin, like in the stories. Kyon thinks he sees Nagato have a very wry smile regardless.
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5-10. One thing that I have noticed over the course of this short and Seven Wonders Overtime is that the author Nagaru Tanigawa is making his characters act as mouth pieces for his interests in talking about other forms of literature, which is quite irritating to be honest. As if Koizumi has magically read all these fantastical novels. I can see Nagato doing so, yes, T, yes, but Koizumi? When would he have the time? During the middle of the night when fighting celestials? Come on. What's more, I only care for THIS novel series, not what the author wants me to care about. This is the first time I have decided to skim read anything in the Haruhi series.
Luckily after the first third of this chapter it gets much better. Its like the author gets back into the grove of writing again.
If the author ever gets on with it, T could be a great girlfriend for Koizumi. Similar interests and both transfer students. I think something regarding the two of them will happen. May or may not be love related. Just a hunch.
I'm so sorry it took me years to get around to reading this. I'm just as slow at reading as the author is at writing, apparently.
Next up is 'The Theater' according to the publishers. If Tanigawa ever gets around to finishing writing it. It might be about Sliders? I hope so!!
Up next: Nothing for now....
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