FIRST TRIAL

[bathymetric]

[ Eventually, time seems to run out. Davy Jones takes a lap around the boat, rather tersely instructing everyone to gather in the theatre.

Once everyone is inside, he herds all of you onto the stage, which has been cleared save for the controls to the elaborate pipe organ built into the room. ]

Step lively, passengers! There's a long ride ahead of ye!

[ And once everyone is on that stage, Davy Jones sits at his organ and begins to play. It's not a familiar song to any of you, and it doesn't sound kind, but it does sound wildly complicated. Or it would be, for someone who can't play with his many tentacles.

As the piece begins, the stage begins to descend. Well, at least the part you're all on, as well as where Jones sits at the organ. And it keeps descending, at least through a few floors before long. The elevator shaft is dark, the music echoing until it fades, the controls apparently too far from the pipe organ above before long. Jones sits in silence as the cramped ride continues. Dull bulbs set into the wall provide just enough illumination to tell where you all are, but the walls are thick steel.

You have to have descended several floors, you imagine, when light starts to creep in at the edges of the platform, along with voices. They sound distant and distorted, but the first thing you hear when the platform breaks into the trial room is men singing, rough and distant.

You can also see the... surprisingly somber room, considering where you are. The walls and floor are all made of glass, allowing you a view of the sea as the ship you now stand on the very lowest deck of pushes through the water. Lights illuminate enough to tell that it is indeed water out there, but the water is perhaps not the most interesting thing out there in the dark.

Below the ship, illuminated by a ghostly aura, sails (for lack of a more fitting word) The Flying Dutchman. If you look closely, sailors more monster than anything else man the deck, and seem to be the source of the song. Davy Jones casts the ship a sad look, then stops a foot on the floor and the song quiets. ]

Take your places, passengers. Ye have this chance alone to find the killer among yer number.

[ In the center of the room stands a circle of sturdy metal podiums. Carmen's seems to be almost... decades older than the rest, coated in rust and barnacles. In the center hangs a circle of screens, currently switched off. ]

If there are questions, I am going anywhere no sooner than the lot of you.

[ Jones moves to look out the window, leaving you all to talk amongst yourselves.

Welcome to your first trial. ]

Comments

[jibunwo]

Consider it this way: if the Captain wants this entire spectacle we're engaging in now, it would be hard to properly accomplish without a corpse. It would not surprise me were the creature instructed to make sure no one got rid of a body in a more permanent way.

[scouserer]

[Constantine nods.]

After all, that'd be too easy.

[jibunwo]

Precisely. Whether she was or wasn't alive in this specific case, I find it safe to assume that the monster would indeed return a discarded corpse.

[ignobel]

My question is, plenty of us already knew there was somethin' throwing things back up 'cause of the old man there. So why would they try that?

[scouserer]

M'not that old....

[hypnowhip]

You look wonderful for your age, darling.

[Encouragement...?!]

[scouserer]

Thanks, Sylvando. I can always count on you.

[ignobel]

Old enough to have a beard! Not old enough to throw your back out gettin' tossed by a big tentacle monster, though, so you've got some years left.

[I'm sorry, you're an old man to her. But she's kidding! Mostly. No pun intended.]

[scouserer]

[GRUMBLE GRUMBLE

to be fair 51 is pretty old for THIS cast]

[ignobel]

[We have a 500-year-old topless dude and a 1000-year-old girl who could pass for everybody's little sister, age is just a number! But also to be fair, Allenby is on the younger end of the cast. ☆]

[oceangirlfriend]

It seems to only throw people. Maybe they were hoping a corpse wouldn't count.

[scythegun]

Are we sure she was dead when she went overboard? What if she wasn't, and it was the fall after being flung back up onto the ship that killed her?

[oceangirlfriend]

Both John and I landed back on deck without incident. Though she could have been somewhat disoriented by the landing and ambushed then.

[queceracera]

I mean, also the Captain would be responsible and that's not really the point of this game.

[He can be helpful, I swear.]

[scythegun]

Are you sure it wasn't just luck that the two of you weren't injured?

[oceangirlfriend]

I suppose it is too small a sample size. But even if the throw did kill her I'd expect more broken bones and other bruising, or an injury to her head as well, instead of simply a broken neck.

[scouserer]

I got slammed back onto the deck, and I was lucky to have not been injured.

[A shrug.]

If someone pushed her intentionally, she might not have been prepared to land back on the ship and landed wrong. And that would technically be murder, still.

[calx]

Would the fault still fall on the individual who threw her rather than the creature in that instance?

[scythegun]

Given the Captain is so desperate for us to kill one another, I think he'd take any chance he was given, even if it was something like this.

[jibunwo]

Desperation? The hope that it would think of a dead body as food? Perhaps both.

[ignobel]

I mean, it didn't look like a real well-executed plan, but... You think so?

[Juggling the notions of coldblooded murderer and murderer in a panic flinging somebody at a giant monster squid or whatever. Can these things exist at the same time??]

[calx]

It could be to disguise something. Saltwater is quite overpowering and distinct.

[ignobel]

I can't think of anything so far that looks like it needed disguising...

[calx]

The banana seems evident that they wanted to disguise something. It's superfluous otherwise, or at the least an extra risk that they didn't need to take, especially considering how it had not oxidized yet.

[ignobel]

This is a lot of fuss over a banana...

[She's!! Just saying!! Though come to think of it.]

Um, if it's that recent, maybe it was just a trap for anybody near the body? Like, hoping they'd mess up the scene, stuff like that.

[Look she doesn't know what else to do with fruit evidence, so here we are.]