The "Harvest Festival" held at Rose Square in Mineral Town a few days ago hadn't exactly gone well. You see, because Mayor Thomas had been careless, there'd been a slight mix-up with the ingredients for the festival dishes, which accidentally left over eighty percent of Mineral Town's residents suffering from food poisoning. An otherwise lovely celebration had to be cut short, and quite a few people ended up resting in the hospital or at home for several days.
Fortunately, the problem hadn't been too serious. Apart from a few people who'd needed to stay in the hospital briefly due to dehydration, everyone else had only suffered from acute gastroenteritis and diarrhea. After Doctor Doug had sent Mayor Thomas around to deliver antidiarrheal medicine and his apologies in person, most people were back to normal by that evening. They'd only felt a little weak in the legs, so there was no need to worry about anything serious.
And so, the matter was over...
Although Mayor Thomas hadn't said a word about what had caused the Harvest Festival mishap, and had taken all the blame himself, saying he hadn't inspected things carefully enough or something like that, plenty of people knew what had happened. The reason the "whole-town hot pot" at the festival had made people sick was surely that someone had put in something they shouldn't have. And the most likely culprit was obviously that troublesome little girl who'd caused trouble in Mineral Town several times before!
Of course, that was only a guess. Since Mayor Thomas hadn't told anyone the truth, most people assumed that too many different ingredients had been added that day, creating some substance that their stomachs couldn't handle. They didn't think much more of it, and only a handful guessed that the mass food poisoning had