Fountain patio

Fountain patio
Link to the template page
[[File:|256px]]
Available evidence	Art museum brochure Ice room photos Lunar teapot Lift Drawing of beautiful women Chocolate
Locations in Zodiac Art Gallery

The fountain patio of the Zodiac Art Gallery is the main area of the first floor, so named for the large fountain at its center. Other than the entrance, the patio is connected to four rooms, each of which has a stream of water that flows into the fountain. There is also an elevator.

Contest murder

Main article: IS-7 Incident

In December 2000, renowned pastry chef Jeffrey Master held a confectionery design competition in his mansion. The prize was the Angel's Recipe Book, a tome of instructions for making various products, originally owned by Master's parents and their pharmaceutical company, the Master Group. For the finals, each of the three remaining contestants was given one of the four rooms connected to the fountain patio to work on their creations overnight. Master used the remaining room to create a dessert design of his own. Master would begin judging the following day.

Before the judging, Master had tea outside with Katherine Hall, his adopted daughter, as well as Delicia Scones, one of the contestants. The two other contestants, Dane Gustavia and Isaac Dover, remained to finish their work, with the latter working on a set of frozen sherbet sculptures modeled after the zodiac signs. At some point, the two sneaked into the room that Master was using for his dessert. Only Gustavia came out, having killed Dover and hidden the body inside Master's dessert. Later, Scones managed to sneak into the contestants' rooms and get a taste of anything edible that she could find.

During the judging, the camera that Master was using to take pictures ran out of film, so he had Hall get more. As she was returning, she heard a loud noise from the room with Master's dessert, and when she looked inside, she saw Dover's dead body inside the dessert, which had broken from being tampered with. She took a photo of the crime scene and informed the authorities, during which Gustavia sneaked the body out of the room and hid it inside the sherbet sculpture representing Gemini, hidden using a fluorescent cloth stolen from Scones' room. He also broke off part of the dessert that was stained with the victim's blood, and threw it into the stream leading to the fountain in the patio, where it dissolved. When Hall returned and entered Dover's room, she saw a signature on all of the sculptures that proved that he was, in fact, a French sculptor named Pierre Hoquet.

Investigation

Detective Tyrell Badd and Prosecutor Manfred von Karma were placed in charge of the ensuing investigation, though the latter restricted the former's activities to do most of the investigation himself. Hall served everyone tea, but unbeknownst to any of them, she was smuggling out Dover's sculptures by covering them with a tablecloth and using a baggage lift to make the setup look like a service cart. Although she was doing this to protect the sculptures from police tampering, she had no idea that the body was hidden within them. Because of this, the body seemingly disappeared, with no one other than the killer having any idea of where it had gone.

Given the circumstances, the police arrested Master for the murder and covered up the investigation, claiming that they had already taken possession of the body. Defense attorney Gregory Edgeworth took Master's case and went to the mansion to investigate. Hall greeted him and Raymond Shields, his assistant, and served them tea. Edgeworth noticed that the saucers were chilled, the only hint of what Hall was hiding under the cloth. He met Badd at the crime scene, and impressed him with his honesty and logic. He also noticed the missing chocolate chunk that Gustavia had broken off.

After investigating the crime scene and Scones' room, Edgeworth engaged in an argument with von Karma. With Edgeworth revealing some shady activity on Scones' part, she admitted that she had secretly gone around sneaking bites out of various sweets, commenting that part of Dover's sculptures tasted salty. Von Karma entered Dover's room to investigate this claim, only to find that all of the sculptures were gone. Edgeworth, Shields, and Badd were forced to wait outside with Hall while von Karma interrogated Scones and Gustavia in Dover's room. Badd, fed up with his treatment under von Karma, decided to help Edgeworth in any way he could, and started sharing information with him. Eventually, von Karma took everyone involved with the case with him for further interrogation, leaving only Edgeworth and Shields behind.

The two returned the next day, but von Karma only allowed them to investigate the patio, as he was growing nervous about not having received an autopsy report. Badd allowed Edgeworth to talk to forensics and learn that traces of chocolate, sherbet, and the victim's blood had been detected inside the fountain. They also spoke with Hall, who showed them photos of the semifinal entries, of which Gustavia's and Dover's were identical in composition, only differing in their specific design. When von Karma returned, Edgeworth argued with him about the relationship between Gustavia and Dover and its relevance to the case, but the prosecutor provided swift rebuttals and tried to get back to investigating.

Edgeworth then began to connect the dots, realizing that the killer must have removed the bloodstain from the crime scene, which meant that the killer must also have moved the body, and that the police did not actually have it, which was why there was no autopsy report. Von Karma was flustered and took Badd off the case before leaving quickly. Edgeworth and Shields decided to leave as well to prepare for the trial, but not before Edgeworth asked Badd to give him records of Master's interrogations. The trial lasted a year due to von Karma producing an autopsy report, which Edgeworth knew was falsified but could not prove it. Eventually, Master confessed to being an accomplice to the murder, but Edgeworth revealed that the police had forced the confession, resulting in von Karma being penalized, even though he won the trial. Meanwhile, Gustavia went to Zheng Fa for three years to improve his confectionery design skills.

The Zodiac Art Gallery

Main article: The Inherited Turnabout

Eighteen years after the murder, Hall bought Master's mansion from his relatives, obtaining the Angel's Recipe Book in the process. She checked on the freezer where she had hidden the sherbet sculptures, and only then discovered Hoquet's body inside one of them. Because the statute of limitations had, to her knowledge, expired on the IS-7 Incident, she decided to take matters into her own hands and bring the real killer to justice herself. To this end, she converted the mansion into an art gallery dedicated to Hoquet's work, hoping to lure in everyone still alive who had been involved in the contest, most importantly the killer.

From the Angel's Recipe, Hall learned that she could produce a toxic gas by combining the common, normally harmless substance normallium with the rarer fatallium, which was the active ingredient in the Master Group's insecticide product, Megatoxin X. A week before opening day, Scones paid a visit to the mansion, giving Hall the opportunity to steal a bottle of Megatoxin X that she had on her person. She arranged the sculptures inside the rooms connected to the fountain patio, the same ones used during the contest, with each room representing a season: from left to right, the Spring Palace, the Summer Palace, the Winter Palace, and the Autumn Palace. She switched the Winter and Autumn Palaces from the expected chronological order as part of her plan to disguise the Autumn Palace as the Winter Palace temporarily, using fluorescent cloths to disguise the autumn statues as the winter statues. She booby-trapped the "Gemini statue", in reality the Pisces statue, with normallium and Megatoxin X in such a way that the poison gas would be produced once the killer attempted to open it. She used a teapot to store the normallium, and hid the teapot inside her service cart after using the normallium.

Gustavia was the first to arrive on opening day. As expected, he headed into the fake Winter Palace. Miles Edgeworth and Raymond Shields soon followed, and Hall greeted them with tea as in the past. As they were viewing the actual Winter Palace, Larry Butz entered the mansion, intending to paint a picture of the Gemini statue. Not knowing that there was an entry fee or a pamphlet with a map, he made the same mistake that Gustavia did. However, when Gustavia opened the Autumn Palace door, it was found that the room was filled with poisonous gas. In the ensuing chaos, Hall planted the bottle of Megatoxin X inside Gustavia's pocket, hoping to make the incident look like a suicide.

The incident attracted the attention of Justine Courtney and Sebastian Debeste, who investigated the Autumn Palace and argued with Edgeworth about the case. While they were preoccupied with the investigation, Hall smuggled the real Winter Palace sculptures to the Summer Palace with the same setup as before. Due to time constraints, she had to put the Gemini sculpture inside a hollow block of frozen sherbet instead of a glass casing, serving chocolates to anyone still in the patio. The light from the fluorescent cloth made the tablecloth appear light blue. Butz saw her moving the "service cart" and sketched the scene. Hall dumped the sculptures, including Hoquet's body, into the stream to dissolve.

Meanwhile, Courtney told Debeste to fetch Scones as a person of interest, but he left the job up to subordinates. While they were waiting, Hall wrapped the tablecloth around her waist and resumed serving tea using the real service cart. At some point, Butz broke the teapot on the cart while trying to serve tea to Courtney, so he found the normallium-stained teapot underneath and switched the two teapots. Hoquet's body eventually floated up to the surface of the fountain, proving that Gregory Edgeworth had been right about the body all along.

This revelation made Miles and Shields important witnesses, so Courtney reluctantly permitted them to continue their involvement in the investigation. Although he had little to go on, with the help of Shields explaining the IS-7 Incident investigation to him, Edgeworth was able to piece together events from both present and past to figure out that Hall was responsible for the theft of the sculptures and body, as well as the poison gas trap. When Gustavia recovered, Edgeworth confronted him and was able to use the evidence that he had gathered to prove that he was responsible for the IS-7 Incident. Gusttavia claimed that the statute of limitations had run out on the incident, but it turned out that his trip to Zheng Fa and Master's trial had extended the time limit, allowing him to be charged after all.