Fifth Trial

[bathymetric]

[ There's a long while of examination before the Mayor speaks up. There's plenty of evidence to pick up yet again this week, after all. ]

Annnd that's going to do it. Wrap it up and head to the bathyspheres, kids, you've got some business to attend to.

[ The bathyspheres take you all down, down, into the now-familiar dome below the city. The similarly familiar red glow persists until the lights properly turn on - the projection of Fontaine's silhouette is gone, of course, replaced by that same flickering "please stand by" message. But your mayor's voice is still the one that speaks over the increasingly empty circle of podiums. ]

If you somehow need a reminder of why you're here, three of you are dead. Get away with it, killer or killers, and the execution room gets to really work overtime today. But I guess if you wanna live, you should find who murdered three people. Could be important for you guys.

[ Welcome to your fifth trial. ]

Comments

[fuckingguy]

[ This is the trial where it finally hits Nandor, really hits him, that so many of them are gone. He looks around the circle, fiddling with his hands, and for a few moments seems at a loss for words.

But then he sees all the people who are still alive, some of whom are very weak and still not used to looking at dead bodies even after all this time, and he finds enough of a sense of authority to proceed with what he does best: just kind of rambling on in a stupid-ass voice. ]

... So, I will begin with what I have discovered in the course of my investigating. Hild first, then Jonathan. Which is in the opposite order of how I actually investigated them, but, you know, one is a guy's room and the other is a corpse.

Hild was laid out on the stage in the theater. [ He raises his right hand in a fist and indicates the spots where the deep wounds on Hild's body were with an emphatic punch: the heart, the gut, and the left thigh. ] She was stabbed three times with a vended knife — here, here, and here. Based off the body cooling, she had been lying there for several hours when she was found. There were also many smaller cut marks on her arms, possibly from the same knife, though when wounds are so small it is hard to tell... the point being, I do not think she "went down easy", as they say. The damage to her arms looked defensive, and she had someone else's blood under her nails. I could not get any more detail than that, due to the massive amount of demon blood on the stage, but trust me when I say it was not hers. The nearby scenery on the stage also showed signs of stabbing and slashing from a knife, so clearly there was some kind of altercation.

Someone moved her around after she was dead and posed the carcass. Similar to how vampires sleep, actually... like, lying on her back, the hands crossed over the chest and the eyes closed. And, she had this slender chisel [ it's an icepick, he's just pulling an icepick out of his clothes ] in her hand. There was a scrap of white cloth nearby on the stage, looked like it was lightly stained — like there was some blood on there, maybe, and it was washed off but not well. Also, she was wearing jean shorts and that small top with the man's face on it, but I do not know if that is significant or not.

Now. Jonathan's room in Suite 1 was not locked. After being roused from my slumber by the body announcement, I went inside to see what the hell was going on, and I found his key on his desk and this head wrap with dried water stains on his bed. He, or whoever entered his room, left this note in the trash.

[ He holds each item up in turn, setting the first two down on his podium to join the icepick and fabric, and keeping the piece of paper held aloft. ]

I will pass it around after reading out loud, but it is very brief and stained with water, so there is not much to see. "Heading out to meet up"... and then it is too blurry to read... "if something", then another blurry bit, "I'm sorry." And that is all it says. It was written in his own hand.

[ And he goes silent, like he's not sure how to conclude this and simply never picks the thread back up. ]

[inaclearing]

That thing - [He's indicating the ice pick.] - that's from the nightclub! I saw it there last night, behind the bar, but this morning it was gone...

[fuckingguy]

So Hild was in there at some point. But why take this thing? She did not even use it to fight her attacker.

[ connect the dots, Brett, he sure as fuck won't be! ]

[inaclearing]

It...

[He stares at it for a moment before deciding to complete the thought.]

It looks like you could use it to poke holes. Like...

[honeyedtea]

Like she was the one attempting to frame Nandor.

[fuckingguy]

... The fuck did I ever do to her?!

[inaclearing]

It wasn't even well done...shouldn't she have known better?

[fuckingguy]

[ thanks for pointing this out pal he would have taken at least five more minutes to get there ]

She did seem more intelligent than that, it is true.

[honeyedtea]

So either it wasn't Hild, or she was just stupider than she looked.

[fuckingguy]

Her body was moved after death. It is possible that whoever killed her put this thing in her hand afterwards, when they were positioning her...

[visiblepattern]

Either way, we can certainly say the incidents are connected - either Hild killed Jonathan before being murdered herself, or the same person killed them both.

[visiblepattern]

It may not have been personal... It doesn't matter who we vote for as long as we vote incorrectly.

[fuckingguy]

[ he makes a dissatisfied grunting noise that is definitely meant to convey the spirit of "I GUESS" ]

[specialyellthing]

[Zinda, who has opted to stand by Nandor instead of on her island, pats his shoulder.]

Well, that’s not nice.