second trial

[airlockedmods]

[Like last week the announcement sounds, the Champions with their gathered evidence file once again to the teleporter where the courtroom waits for them.

The a circle of podiums has changed since last week. The Griffin, Toby, and Angelica's floating portraits have joined Chintanda's above their respective podiums as well as the bright green having been changed to a glaring red.

The Overseers are waiting on their floating platform when the first group of Champions arrive. They're back in their black suits, side by side. Jamie's expression is grim but he looks more mentally present than the last trial. Bolton, on the other hand, looks stern but not grim, arms crossed over his chest. Once again, he's the one who makes the announcement.]

Welcome, Champions, to the courtroom. Sixteen of you have entered, but - in the best case scenario - only fifteen of you will leave. Compile your evidence and figure out who the killer is. If you vote correctly, the culprit will be executed and the rest of you will be allowed to go back upstairs. If you vote wrong, however, the killer goes free and the rest of you take the punishment in their place.

Remember, there is no time limit but keeping things interesting is in your best interests.

Comments

[voltrounds]

...that's weird. Why would someone leave the books out, but put the notes away?

[misplacedxsheath]

Perhaps to disguise the fact that they had access to a sample of her handwriting.

[voltrounds]

So we'd believe that fake note.

[misplacedxsheath]

Precisely. If we were to believe that nobody had seen her handwriting before, we would dismiss the idea of a forgery as impossible.

[stitch_in_time]

An' books left out in the library wouldn't be hugely unusual t'begin with. Forgettin' the glass seems more out of place here, you ask me, but that could just be a time-crunch.

[misplacedxsheath]

Or they had nowhere else to dispose of it. They likely wanted it to seem as if the victim paid a visit to the diner alone, and disposing of glass in the trash compactor presents its own risks. Separated, there at least remains the possibility that she brought a drink to the library and then left it before she went to the diner.

[voltrounds]

Or--what if the killer was never in the library? Maybe Angelica brought the notes back with her herself.

[stitch_in_time]

Grabbed her notes an' booked it back to her room when she started gettin' sick. That could be it. It'd explain why the notes were out of order, too, if she just set 'em down and tried rushin' for the toilet.

[voltrounds]

Yeah, she wouldn't have known she'd been poisoned, only that she felt sick...

But no, Shadow's right. Her notes would have been in order to begin with. Someone else must have gone through them.

[damnfourthemerald]

Maybe seeing if she found a way out or anything useful? Several of us have been trying to find anything in all those books that might give us a leg up.

[misplacedxsheath]

I think it's most likely they were searching for points of reference for forging the note. A person's handwriting can vary even among the same letter based on its position in a word or proximity to other letters, so using a single page as an example is unlikely to yield fully convincing results.

[ratherdoweddings]

That's true. So they found all these notes and were going through to figure out what this letter looked like when it's next to that one, things like that. Sometimes people's handwriting varies a lot!

[misplacedxsheath]

Leaving the notes out of order seems like a sloppy mistake, but if they were already running short of time after cleaning up the mess from the manner of death and however long it took to make the letter compare convincingly to the handwriting sample...

[voltrounds]

That would be a strange thing to care about after murdering someone to escape.

[fatherofsin]

Forgery references, most likely.

[overears]

That's right. It was probably to copy her handwriting.