Audience

The audience area is the place from which an assassin was believed to have targeted President Teikun Ō of Zheng Fa during his speech at Gourd Lake in March 2019.

The speech

 * Main article: Turnabout Target

On March 22, 2019, Manosuke Naitō, one of President's Ō's bodyguards, made an offer to journalist Mikiko Hayami. In exchange for a special interview with the president, she would come to the president's speech wearing a red raincoat, and point a laser pointer at his forehead. She was not informed of the purpose of this request, but she agreed to it. In reality, she was being set up to take the fall for a bogus assassination attempt on the president, orchestrated by Naitō. A day later, an assassin named Shelly de Killer tried to kill the president for real, but was thwarted by Gai Tojiro, the head bodyguard.

On March 25, President Ō arrived at Gourd Lake from a seaplane and stepped out onto a stage specially prepared for the occasion. From the audience, Hayami turned her yellow parka inside-out into a red raincoat to disguise herself. She then used her tape recorder to record the president's speech. In front of her was the Chief Prosecutor with one of his subordinates, Winston Payne, and their conversation was also recorded. Meanwhile, Kay Faraday took a photo of herself with the stage and audience in the backdrop, with the backs of Hayami and the prosecutors visible. Hidden elsewhere in the audience was Shelly de Killer, who was also wearing a red raincoat to disguise himself as Hayami.

As Hayami pointed her laser pointer at the president, a gunshot suddenly rang out, throwing the audience into a panic. Now finding it undesirable to be mistaken for the false assassin, de Killer ditched his raincoat under a nearby stall. Faraday caught another photo of the crowd, with de Killer in it.