unknownseas | Fifth Trial

Entry tags:

Fifth Trial

[ 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. ]

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

[ 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. ]

[Forrest takes a moment to just breathe and calm himself; the last time they were here was bad for him, and he's now isolated podium-wise.

But as before, he has due diligence to perform.]

Jonathan's body was found in the nightclub near the bar. He seems to have collapsed in the middle of...well, not having a very pleasant time - he was crying and seems to have been very upset judging by his expression.

From what I can tell, he was poisoned. His lips and fingertips were blue, and the signs we've seen with previous poisonings were otherwise there. He was holding Hagakure's prayer beads, and his other hand appeared to have been wet at one time? He had small bits of paper sticking to the skin on his fingertips, but it was in a fragile, flaky sort of way.

He also had wounds on his neck - a pair of puncture wounds, evenly-spaced. Somewhat in the way carnivorous animals do? They missed anything vital, however, and they seem to have been made after he died. I'm...not sure what that's about.

[ there's a beat, before: ]

Are you fucking shitting me?

...No, in what way?

... sorry, Forrest, did not mean to snap at you. It is not like you put them there.

But, from what you are talking about it sounds like someone was trying to make it look like I bit him.

But that's so pointlessly horrid...!

[He is so sure Nandor didn't do this?]

Uhhhh - here.

[Brett did remember to go and grab the coffee and snacks - apple-cinnamon baked oatmeal cups, courtesy of the restaurant - that he got ready earlier, before everything. But he just sort of shoves them at whoever's nearest him. His hands are still shaky and he doesn't want to spill.

His normal calm demeanor is cracking; he's not crying, but he looks shaken and incredibly on-edge. Still, he forces it down as well as he can.]

Jonathan - he was in the nightclub. I just saw him there last night, I walked back to the dorms with him...why'd he go back there alone -

[The singing, it seems, is also slipping through the cracks.]

Uh, there was a glass that smelled like cyanide. And another one that was clean. Oh, I didn't - I didn't write any of it down -

[He takes out his own notebook, laying it on his podium alongside Jonathan's taser and Jonathan's journal.]

These were there too. And a page ripped out of the journal. It's wet, it isn't all legible, but it says...

"Dear -

Thank you for always being there for us and providing - . I know you have been through a lot and do not deserve to be here but I hope you are able to find peace and eventually - . I will always remember you fondly.

Jonathan Harker"

[And he turns to furiously writing all of that down in his own journal. He has not taken any of the coffee or oatmeal himself.]

It doesn't even make any sense! Even if I would kill Jonathan, which I would not, I would be dead if I drank the blood of someone who was poisoned... or at least very ill. And I have told all of you guys as much!

Edited 2022-07-23 16:15 (UTC)

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...

At least whoever was planning to frame you was too stupid to do a passable job of it. With any luck, they'll have made the rest of this easy for us as well.

[ she's not even pretending to be nice anymore.......... ]

It's a bad frame job. Zero stars.

[they're both rude now]

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! ]

What exactly is cyanide...?

And whomever did that to Jonathan certainly did it after he was poisoned, we can say that definitively. The wounds didn't bleed very much, if at all; besides, if they were for the purpose of draining blood...I'd assume you know where the major blood vessels are by now, Nandor, and this didn't puncture any of them.

It is, indeed, shit work, but I appreciate you all saying it.

[ listen, even he knows they're not doing it out of affection for him, but still!! ]

It's a poison. Usually applied to drinks.

[ Makes direct eye contact with Mielle.

Takes a sip of a smoothie he brought into the trial. ]

Tastes like almonds.