THIRD TRIAL

[whimsicalism]

THIRD TRIAL

THE CONTAINMENT CENTER

Still hungry, and perhaps with some new fashionable shoe colors, the students are herded into the elevator, which is lined with a plastic tarp this week. With the elevator becoming a perpetually emptier space, there's plenty of room for the Prefect herself to squeeze in next to everyone else, standing at the front of the group and ineffectively covering the side of her head with her free hand as soon as the tearing screen of metal and high-buzzing florescent lights kicks in.

The descent this time takes the group of students past several new chambers. The first is occupied by a grotesque caricature of a lunch lady, who ladles unidentifiable pitch black goop onto a constantly rotating line of trays as she smiles at the group with a single tooth. The clown, ever present for the show with his dwindling collection of balloons, rides a tiny tricycle through pools of spilled acrylic paint, the wheels squeaking as they paint out blood red patterns on the cell floor. The last chamber the students will see before arriving in the trial room is completely empty, save for a cloudy grey fog that blinks inside it like a thundercloud.

Instead of the usual black ram emblem on the telecom screen, the Principal's flame-wreathed silhouette is visible this week, though his chair is turned away from the camera and only the outline of his back seems to be visible. There's an empty container of Rocky Road ice cream sitting next to him on a side table, the spoon still balanced in the carton. The entire trial room itself smells like the lunch time rush at a cafeteria or fast food restaurant, the smells of grilling meat, roasting vegetables, and sweet dessert occasionally passing through a chamber that is completely devoid of any actual food.

With some hesitation, Nanami goes to the desk next to the podiums and takes her old seat. She glances back at the projector screen, then her shoulders slump forward and she leans down against the desk.

"It's happened again. Valmont, the... Boss...Baby. Has been killed. Maybe this really will go on forever, until no one is left... Anyway, you need to find out what happened if you want to live and not starve. ...Don't forget the rules. Get started."

As she finishes speaking a sheep walks around the trial room, handing everyone an apple and some graham crackers. Of course, even Nanami gets a small treat. The Little Brother glances at the shape of Father in his chair before quietly placing a finger to it's robotic face only for the angry voice of your Principal rings out. "Hey! Don't--ah, forget it. That'll get you through the trial. Maybe you'll bust a gut or something. What are you waiting for?! You heard Miss Kiryuu, start already!"

Investigation | Podium Layout | Locations | IC Profiles | IC Rules | IC Evidence Presentation | Evidence List | NPC Questions | Dorm Map | Paint Map

OOC NOTES

Welcome to the third trial! Consider this your reminder to make sure to get in your Week 2 AC by tomorrow's weekly post and to start getting your Week 3 AC ready to submit. Make sure to get your regains in by tomorrow night!

Remember, if you can carry it you probably can bring it. We mainly want to discourage corpse desecration, if we can, so while the body itself isn't allowed into the trial most things are. If your character has access to a piece of evidence and you don't know if you can bring it in, you can either ask the mods privately if that's possible or by pinging them in the post itself. If a piece of evidence is forgotten, you can either assume retroactively that someone did or that the sheep brought it in to make sure that everything is tidy.

As always, just put MODS in the header of your comment to get our attention for any clarification.

Good luck!

Comments

ORDER OF EVENTS

[keyringwitness]

A- Alright. I think we need to take a step back and look at things from a new angle.

First of all, let's establish the order of events of the crime. It's simple compared to the last one, but once we know the basic timeline, everything else m- might just fall into place.

[Yasu opens her grimoire, where she's written her notes about the crime. She was already taking things seriously, but after the chaos of Edward's trial, she's on a whole new level of dedication.]

As for the murder itself, judging by the knife he had in his pocket and the letter, Valmont left his room with the intent to murder Dylan. I can't think of any other reason why he'd leave with a knife and then make a beeline to someone else's room. His murderer must've interrupted him before he got the chance, though. Taking a guess at what happened... Valmont reached Dylan's door when the culprit attacked him, aiming for a clean neck slice. They missed, just barely grazing him and leaving a small bloodstain. Then Valmont turned around, and tried to close the distance to defend himself. Or, er, maybe he ran?

T- That's all just speculation, sorry. After the initial graze, the culprit slit Valmont's throat in the middle of the floor and dragged him outside to the playground, where we found him.

Although we don't know why yet, the culprit entered the sensory deprivation chamber after the crime. A neck wound bleeds a lot, so some of it would've gotten on the culprit no matter what angle they attacked Valmont from. From there, we can assume that the culprit dried off and deposited the towels in the laundry room. The blood probably washed off in the sensory deprivation chamber, which would explain the color discrepancy between the towels and what was in the water... although wouldn't more of the blood have gotten on their clothes first? Hm...

This leaves us with a few questions.

[Yasu starts counting them off on her fingers.]

One, where did the dirt in the sensory deprivation chamber come from? Valmont was killed inside the academy, so there couldn't have been a struggle, and he was barely in the playground anyways. How could the killer's body have gotten so dirty as to leave so much mud in the water?

Two, why did the culprit bother taking Valmont's body into the playground? Considering the rest of the scene, I don't believe they were trying to hide where he was killed. Nothing else points to that.

Three, why were Valmont's shoes in the oven? That's just bizarre.

Four, where did the rest of his blood go? If your throat gets cut, you obviously, um, bleed a bunch, and there wasn't enough blood pooled under Valmont's body even without what he lost while he was dragged away.

Five, why did the culprit spread the paint? That splash of dried blood by Dylan's door was under the paint, and the trail must've been spilled around the same time given that they're equally dry. So the killer was the one to splash all that paint around, not Valmont.

[Yasu pauses, thinking for a few moments.]

I... might be able to answer one of those, actually. Is it possible that Edward wasn't the only blood-drinker in the class? If someone, um, drank from Valmont's neck-wound, that would explain how it got on their skin rather than just their clothes, and why there wasn't as much blood as there should've been.

[copycut]

The last two times, the culprit's shoes pointed us to them. [ You know, at least partially. ] Most of us walked through the paint when we stepped out of our rooms this morning, didn't we? Maybe they were trying to cover up blood or dirt on their shoes, in a way that wouldn't single them out.

[temmapathy]

Does anyone know exactly how long it takes for paint to dry? That might give us a time of when the culprit dumped the paint.

[copycut]

Hm~m... I know it can take longer to dry if there's a lot of it, but other than that, not exactly.

[violence_ensues]

The paint I know takes around ten minutes to dry, but Yasu taught me there's lotsa other methods of painting.

[canreallymove]

[Judging by Sonic's frown, it's obvious he disagrees on certain parts of Yasu's theory, but.]

Well, my thought on the shoes was that the killer was getting red--er. Rid of evidence. The shoes must've had somethin' on them.

[canismajorcontrolfreak]

...he tried to kill me...

[A part of him wanted to say it wasn't true, but...with all the evidence lined up, and knowing Valmont was-well, the way that he was...]

He...he was going to kill me, if someone else hadn't...

[canreallymove]

Dylan, don't. Don't think about that right now.

[He'll come over if he has to, but.]

You're alive. That's what matters. And stayin' alive is what you gotta do.

[canismajorcontrolfreak]

I-I'm sorry, it's just...

A lot. To think about, right now.

[violence_ensues]

[Bat hugs.]

[canismajorcontrolfreak]

[Bat hugs forever and always.]

[cellpreservation]

Do you remember if he made a promise with you last week? Or was he talking about someone else?

[canismajorcontrolfreak]

He-He didn't-

[And then it hits him.]

The-the talisman! He-he wanted to kill me for...a piece of history?!

[temmapathy]

Talisman?

[canismajorcontrolfreak]

It-that's what he called it? It was this-stone octagon with a purple rabbit carved on the front. I got it from the vending machine. When he saw I had it, he...he said it was his attacked me for it.

It's...it's still in my room...

[violence_ensues]

[It can be added to the memorial wall after the trial.]

[holyironmade]

I... I cannot accept this reasoning! Valmont may not have been the strongest, and he may have favored Dylan as a target over the others, but he was not extremely weak. He also had heard our reasoning about double and parallel homicides - targeting both Dylan and the intruder would be an option. We also see that the culprit gave Valmont an extremely mild injury. It's true that he could have been shocked by this injury. Perhaps even run away. But explain it to me. Explain how the culprit got close enough to graze Valmont, but not so much as a single thread of clothing, let alone blood, was cut by Valmont's knife...! You expect me to believe that the culprit caught up to him, stabbed him in the neck where he was standing, somehow caught the body so it did not bruise when it hit the ground, and did all this without a single drop of blood on Valmont's knife? That his clothes are as straight as the day they were custom tailored? Oh, perhaps they washed the knife, that is completely dry?

I'm aware that it will be beyond belief on basis of character, but I believe that it is possible he knew he would die that night. That he recognized the greater good described by his "classmate" and submitted to their plan.

[violence_ensues]

Wait... you mean... he had someone kill him in order to stop everyone else from starving!?

[holyironmade]

Surely whoever killed him wanted to keep us from starving. We know Carrie would have accepted that fate. We know that both Reika and Edward had the overall group in our hearts.

I believe this is IC knowledge

[violence_ensues]

And if I member, you didn't want to eat any food for us to have more.

[temmapathy]

He did fall down crying after I kicked him once. If he was on the ground when they killed him, the blood wouldn't get on his clothes, would it?

[For the sake of Jeanne's current state, she does not add "like a baby."]

[holyironmade]

I see no tearstains on his face, no bitten nail. He was not intimidated enough by your approach that he could not devise a plan to hide behind me. I highly doubt that the stupefaction would be so complete, but I have withdrawn my objections in light of Yasu's suggestion that the first strike was thrown instead.

[keyringwitness]

...I don't think we should take it as a given that the first attack was up close. H- Honestly, given how cleanly his throat was slit, I'm inclined to think that it was the opposite: the culprit threw one weapon, but just barely grazed Valmont. Valmont then turned to confront the culprit and get into range to defend himself, but his throat was slit in the middle of the dorm before he could get a single attack in.

[holyironmade]

Threw it?

...threw it?

Threw... it...???

Yasu truly is a genius.

...I accept this line of reasoning. I even accept that he could have been stupefied in this stance, and lunged at. As long as you do not posit that the first wound was in intimate range, my objections are withdrawn.

[canreallymove]

...

The "greater good"?

[Yes, Sonic, the greater good.]