Professor Bernice Summerfield in the Masquerade of Death (audio story)

, or simply The Masquerade of Death, was the final audio story of the fifth season of the Big Finish Bernice Summerfield series.

Publisher's summary
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to another in our exciting series of adventures with the witty, irreverent and courageous heroine, Professor Bernice Summerfield.

In tonight's story, our daring adventuress and her sidekick, Adrian, find themselves imprisoned in a crumbling palace in the Prison Season of Spring, replete with an imperious queen and prissy but rather sweet AI gaoler.

How did they arrive? And why doesn't anyone know who the famous Bernice Summerfield is?

Before too long, there is a murder — as there always is — and Benny is accused. Who might possibly be setting her up for a fall? Could it be the Player — a mysterious figure of rhyme and chaos? And why is everybody so obsessed with his plays?

Benny may find that her only way out of this prison is to play along with the fiction. But is there someone behind the scenes manipulating her strings? Could she end up a mere "costume" in someone's disturbing game of dress-ups? After all her adventures, could this be the final episode?

Plot
Benny awakens from a nightmare in which the Player of All Seasons doubts her existence and tells the audience in a theatre that he intends to dissect her character. Adrian promises to protect her even in her dreams and they go for breakfast with the Queen of Spring, learning from the Spinster on the way that it is still unknown how she and Adrian arrived in the Prison Season of Spring. The Queen, who is imprisoned in this season, informs them that one of her party guests has been murdered and gives them time to solve the crime to prove their innocence, assisted by the Spinster. Meanwhile, she will await the arrival of the Player from the Winter Season.

Consulting the Spinster's records, Benny travels back in time to the party, invisible to everybody but the Spinster, and finds the body behind the bar, faceless. The body registers as a new character to the Spinster, who did not realise that it was that of a dead person until later, and Benny deduces that it was put there by the Player at the Queen's beckoning. The Queen is erased for ten seconds whilst the body appears, making Benny even more suspicious of her. In the present, Adrian persuades the Spinster to allow him to leave the Spring Season and the Queen speaks with her reflection in her mirror about her plan to escape with the help of the Player.

Benny returns to the present and finds that there is no record of the Queen's arrival nor of her crime, making her accuse the Queen of being a fiction. The Queen disappears after being confronted by Benny, but the Player performs a rewrite and enters the scene just before she does so, saving her. He captures Benny and uses the eye-gouger to remove her face to see what she is composed of. She awakens in the Royal Season of High Summer with her face, saved by the Spinster, and finds that Adrian is the King of Summer; he has the Vizier, whom Benny recognises as the Queen of Spring, charge her with murder of one of his subjects and puts her on trial, soon finding her guilty and condemning her to be unmasked.

When Benny rejects the authority of the court and unmasks the Vizier, she finds that she is actually the Player. The Player presents Benny as the main character of his new play, The Death of an Adventuress; or, How to Put an End to Snooping Heroines, and she starts speaking in rhyme as she becomes part of his masquerade. The King orders her to be decapitated, but she awakens back in Spring as its queen and the Spinster warns her not to fully embrace her new role. Benny attends her party and the Spinster tells her that the Player will soon make a body appear by the bar and that Benny will be placed inside of it, so she has the Spinster open the day's storybook and writes away all of the party guests bar Adrian before making him believe in her as Benny rather than the Queen. As a result, she is saved from becoming the body.

Benny deduces that the Player is not real and needs to inhabit characters in order to exist; he challenges her to a verbal battle of control during a swordfight and wins, unmasking her. The Spinster edits her out of the scene to an earlier point in the fight, which means that the structure of the storyline will become unstable and collapse, destroying herself. The Player inhabits the younger Benny, but Benny reveals that the unmasked body is the empty body which she wrote out of the party scene, meaning that the Player is inhabiting something that does not exist and will be written out by the Spinster. Benny declares that The Masquerade of Death is over and has the Spinster burn the storybook before the Spinster disappears, after which Benny wakes herself up.

Benny is in a hospital with Adrian at her side, having been taken there by Braxiatel four days prior when she was found unconscious in her room. Adrian explains that Benny had found a play with a complex virus contained within, apparently deliberately planted there to try to kill her. He tells her not to worry about her inability to remember any of these events and wishes her sweet dreams, promising to be there when she wakes up again.

Cast

 * Bernice Summerfield - Lisa Bowerman
 * Adrian Wall - Harry Myers
 * The Player - Robin Sebastian
 * The Spinster - Joyce Gibbs
 * The Queen of Spring - Sunny Ormonde

Crew

 * Cover Art - Adrian Salmon
 * Director - John Ainsworth
 * Executive Producer - Jason Haigh-Ellery
 * Music and Sound Design - Jane Elphinstone
 * Producer - Gary Russell
 * Writer - Stewart Sheargold

Worldbuilding

 * The Duke of Autumn, the King of Summer and the Matriarch of Winter are prisoners.

Continuity

 * The Player mentions that Benny is a self-professed professor. (PROSE: Love and War)