- While at the royal ball with Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood finds herself in the middle of a mystery. Can she solve the case before midnight strikes?
- Little Red Riding Hood, a girl wearing a red hood, meets Cinderella, a girl covered in ash on her journey. The two, who have been changed into a nice dress by a witch, run over a man in a pumpkin carriage on the way to the ball. Fearing that they would find out, they managed to hide the corpse and safely arrived at the ball at the castle, where Cinderella fell in love with the prince. Meanwhile, the ball is interrupted by the discovery of a man's corpse. Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella face the biggest pinch.
- A pretty little girl had been gifted a red velvet hood by her loving grandmother. As the girl wore this hood at all times during all of her adventures, she came to be known as Little Red Riding Hood (Kanna Hashimoto). The girl gradually grew up to be a very intelligent woman. On this particular day, Red Riding Hood is traveling through a forest when she is suddenly stopped by a witch named Barbara (Kimura Midoriko). Despite trying to avoid Barbara by all means, the witch is hell-bent on giving her a pair of new magical shoes. But Barbara's magic is self-admittedly bad with shoes, and so she ruins Red Riding Hood's shoes in the process. As the girl washes them at a nearby stream, the boots get carried away by the water, and she has to chase them.
When Red Riding Hood finally tracks down her boots, a different woman is wearing them, but she also readily returns them to her. This woman, in shabby clothes and injured bare feet, introduces herself as Cinderella (Yûko Araki). Through her exceptional skills of observation, Red Riding Hood realizes that Cinderella is bullied by her stepmother and stepsisters, who always treat her as their maid. Her stepsisters Anne and Margot were preparing to attend the prince's ball that night, where the prince is supposed to choose his bride. The stepmother hires the best hairdresser for Anne. Cinderella was in the jungle because Margot killed her beloved pigeon and Cinderella was burying it. Cinderella wants to go to the ball as she has heard that the prince is a nice person, who doesn't care about looks. Cinderella says that Margot threw away her shoes. She got cuts in her feet when picking Raspberries, as the bushes had thorns.
Soon, Barbara appears once more, and this time, she uses her magic to turn the two young women's clothes into very fancy and rich attire. The witch's niece, Tekla (Kiritani Mirei), also a witch, arrives next, and she gives the women a pair of exquisite glass slippers each, with the warning that the magic will wear off in 24 hours. Now dressed as noblewomen of very high family and culture, Cinderella and Red Riding Hood travel towards the king's castle.
The witches further help them by transforming a pumpkin into a carriage and a rat into their coachman, Paul (Muro Tsuyoshi). As this carriage travels through the forest roads towards the hill, something seems to jump right in front of them and is hit by the vehicle. Paul realizes that the carriage has hit and run over a man, who has died from the grave injury. Cinderella immediately recognizes the dead man as Hans (Kaji Masaki), the renowned hairdresser of the king, who could transform anyone into an image of perfect beauty and charm. It is once again Red Riding Hood's detective skills that reveal that this death is more mysterious than it seems, for Hans had not died from the coach accident but had already been dead from a heavy injury at the back of his head.
Hans' body is hidden by the road with leaves, and the coach arrives at the castle. An ugly woman, covered in rags is not allowed to enter the ballroom. Red Riding Hood and Cinderella reach the ball and also see the latter's stepmother and the elder stepsister, Anne. The younger sister, Margot, is missing, though, and even her sibling and mother are confused about where she is. It is also noticed that Anne has gotten her long hair cut short by Hans, who had told her that the prince was fond of women with shorter hair.
Soon, the king of the land, Bovell (Sato Jiro), and his son, Prince Gilbert (Iwata Takanori), reach the hall, and the party begins. As the prince is choosing women he likes for a dance, all the young ladies gathered try to impress the man. But it is Cinderella who immediately grabs Gilbert's attention, and the two start to dance together. Red notices that someone else at the ball is also wearing glass slippers. However, this merry-making is cut short when a guard of the king's army reaches the place and informs everyone about the mysterious death of Hans. Since the man's body had been found on the way to the castle, it is deemed that the killer must be at the hall, and so everyone's carriages are checked. Since Paul had already cleaned the women's coach earlier, no blood is found on it. But pieces of cheese were found around Hans's body. The woman in rags sneaks into the castle.
The guards go to investigate at Hans' house. A bloodied whetstone had been found lying at the place, which meant that the murder had taken place at the hairdresser's house between 1 and 3 pm that afternoon, and this was the murder weapon. Along with this, a number of beautiful locks of hair with decorative ribbons on them had also been found, suggesting that someone who had gone for a haircut must have killed the hairdresser. A woman with shot hair must be the killer. Cinderella notices Anne's ribbon among the ones found at Hans's house. She says Anne was always proud of her beautiful hair.
Gradually, as Red Riding Hood starts to investigate the matter and other witnesses are spoken to, more revelations are made. Anne reveals that she went to Hans to get her haircut at 10 AM but didn't want her hair short as she loved them long and flowing. Hans cut her hair forcefully. She also adds that she had entered the castle at 1 PM to meet the prince and she overheard a conversation in his chambers.
A secret that had existed between Hans and Prince Gilbert. A year before the present time, the prince had fallen madly in love with a maid of the castle named Remi (Yamamoto Mizuki). The woman also loved the prince, and they intended to marry each other. Gilbert knew that his father would object to the matter because of the difference in their social class, but he was sure that he could convince the king. However, Remi suddenly disappeared one day, never to be seen again. Gilbert believed that his father, King Bovell, must have done something to his lover, and out of anger, he secretly threw the royal crown into the trash. Bovell says that he had nothing to do with Remi's disappearance.
The sly hairdresser, Hans, had found out about this incident and held this information against Prince Gilbert as a means of blackmail. The hairdresser also had his own secret, for despite being extremely skilled at his job, he was tremendously jealous of any woman with long, beautiful natural hair that he had not dressed for them. As a sort of twisted revenge, he would cut off the hair of these women and store them at his house. On the day of the ball, Prince Gilbert had found out about this when Hans came to meet him in the afternoon, but he could not do anything about it since the hairdresser threatened to reveal his secret too.
Instead, Hans blackmailed the prince into giving him an expensive mirror, which was a family heirloom. Although Gilbert initially agreed, he later decided not to cowardly carry forward this corrupt relationship and thought that he would confess about his crime to the king that night. When Hans' messenger came to the castle later to collect the mirror, Gilbert turned him away. But because of this secret between the two men, Prince Gilbert is arrested on suspicion of murder. He was not in his room for the dance rehearsal. His claim that he had been on a stroll through the forest is not taken seriously by the king. However, Red Riding Hood finds a piece of thorn that had fallen from Gilbert's clothes and proves that he must have taken the stroll since thorn bushes grew on that particular path. A woman in poor, shabby clothes also sneaks into the ballroom and provides an alibi for the prince. She says that she saw the prince on a hilltop between 1 and 3 PM that day. Although this woman's face is hidden, her words are considered, and Prince Gilbert is released.
As it is the stroke of midnight, Red and Cinderella make a hasty exit from the ball before the magic wears off, and Cinderella leaving one of her glass slippers behind in her rush. Red stays with Cinderella in her room. Red cannot sleep and goes into the forest.
Red Riding Hood makes some more progress when she finds Cinderella's younger step-sister, Margot (Wakatsuki Yumi), hiding in the forest. Along with the others in her family, Margot was also extremely cruel and harsh to Cinderella, as she had apparently thrown away her shoes and then told her to go fetch raspberries for her. This, according to Cinderella, was the reason why she was barefoot and had scratches all over her feet at the beginning.
Now, when Red Riding Hood meets Margot and talks to her, she learns that the latter had received a letter from Hans that afternoon, asking her to go to his house so that he could style his hair. However, when Margot reached the place, she was hit by someone from behind, and the woman fainted from the blow. Margot was regaining consciousness when she was hit again. When she woke up, though, Margot found the bloodied whetstone in her hand and the dead body of Hans lying in front of her. She believed that she must have somehow committed the murder as revenge for Hans having cut Anne's beautiful hair short, as she saw Anne's hair on Hans's desk.
It was then that Margot made a plan to dispose of the dead body in a way that would make it seem like the man had died in an accident. She took Hans' body to the forest and then waited for a carriage to pass by on the road. As soon as she saw Cinderella and Red Riding Hood's magical carriage, she threw the body in front of it and then hid herself in the forest. The guards find Margot and Red. Red sees a piece of glass fall from Margot's dress. Although Red Riding Hood allows the guards to arrest Margot for being a bully, she also admits that the woman is not the real killer.
Red Riding Hood reveals that it was actually her friend, Cinderella, who had actually committed the murder and hidden her act. On the afternoon of the ball, Cinderella had been wishing she could get beautiful by some means when Hans walked into the scene and offered to dress her hair and make her pretty. As Cinderella herself said, this fantasy world was obsessed with physical appearance and beauty, making it an almost necessary attribute. Like everyone else, though, Cinderella had also become obsessed with this same perception of beauty and agreed to Hans' offer.
When the two went over to the hairdresser's house, Hans tried to cut off Cinderella's hair without her consent, out of his jealousy. The woman realized this in time, and in order to save her hair, she struck the man down with his whetstone and killed him. She then made the plan of inviting Margot to the place, knocking her unconscious, and fleeing the scene so that whoever would come to the house next would believe that Margot had committed the murder. This would have been the case, too, if Hans' messenger had come to the place, but since Prince Gilbert had turned him down, Margot had all the time to carry out her different plan in order to save herself.
That afternoon, even before she had been approached by Hans, Cinderella had met with Tekla and got herself a pair of magical glass slippers. When she killed Hans, the woman had been wearing this very pair of shoes. When Margot came over, and Cinderella had to knock her unconscious with the whetstone, she failed to do so with the first blow. Instead, she had to take another hit, with a different weapon, and she used one of her glass slippers to hit her sister. One of the long heels had broken off from the impact, and it is this clue that Red Riding Hood uses to solve the crime. Later on, when Tekla once again sees Cinderella in the forest with Red Riding Hood, the fairy could not recognize her as the same woman she had earlier met since Barbara had already transformed Cinderella's appearance into that of a princess. This meant that Cinderella actually had two pairs of glass slippers, one of which she used to commit the murder, and the other she wore to the ball. Cinderella had buried the broken pair in the grave of her pigeon. When Red first Cinderella, she was barefoot, because she had buried her broken pair of glass slippers.
Cinderella tries to deny the charges at first, but when the first pair of glass slippers transform back into her own shoes after 24 hours, Cinderella confesses to all her crimes. As she is taken away by the guards, the woman asks Prince Gilbert for acceptance, but the man denies giving any consolation to the murderer.
With the murder mystery solved, Prince Gilbert now has to choose a bride for himself, and Red Riding Hood solves another puzzle as well. The woman in shabby clothes is none other than the prince's original lover, Remi. One year ago, when the two were deeply in love, Remi had also been invited to Hans' house by the cruel hairdresser, where he tried to cut off her beautiful long hair out of his very same jealousy. Remi somehow managed to escape the disaster, but she was left with a big scar on her cheeks from the scissors. Because of this scar, which made her less beautiful, Remi believed that Prince Gilbert would not accept her, and so she hid herself from him and society.
But Remi was still in love with the man, and she always kept a secret watch on him. Now, when Gilbert learns of this entire matter and also meets with Remi, he still confesses his love for her, stating that the scar or anything else would not lessen his feelings for his beloved. Soon, Remi and Gilbert marry with the blessings of King Bovell, and Red Riding Hood also attends the occasion.
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