TTN Case 3

**This page details the events of TTN's third case. For the main chapter, trial and investigation see TTN Chapter 3.**

## Truth Bullets

### Condition of the Theatre (Theatre)

There are slashes in many of the seats along the path to the projection room.

### Ása's Body (Theatre)

The Ultimate Digital Artist's body is slumped against the wall in the projection room. There are several stab wounds in her chest.

### Pile of Films (Theatre)

The rolls of film are messily piled up. There are blood finger prints on them. The film at the top of the pile has blood smudged across it, like someone tried to wipe it off.

### Wood Piece (Storeroom)

There is a long, broken piece of wood leaning beside the door.

### Stained Cloth (Storeroom)

A cloth stained with blood lays beside the door. It's hard to see its original color and it looks to have been kicked out of the way.

### Collapsed Shelves (Storeroom)

Countless objects are scattered across the floor, all covered in blood. A few pieces of broken wood are in the mix.

### Pile of Books (Storeroom)

A pile of books is stacked beside the curtain on the less bloody side of the room. These books are in better condition than everything else in the room, still a little bloody and bent, but not ruined. They are mostly softcover puzzle books but there is also a large hardcover dictionary at the base of the pile of books. There is blood splattered across the front cover from one corner.

### Blood Trail (Storeroom)

A trail of blood goes across the floor and beneath the curtain.

### Curtain (Storeroom)

A curtain made of a large tablecloth separates the room, it is set over a rope that is tied to a part of the roof on each side. It's tied tightly on one side, but the other side is much looser. Where the blood trail goes beneath it, a small amount of blood is splashed up it and there looks to be some fingerprints. There are more bloody fingerprints on the rope above at the same position.

### Seika's Body (Storeroom)

The Ultimate Archer's body is on the floor in one corner behind the curtain. It's almost unrecognisable. There are splatters of blood and dark bruises everywhere. Seika's arm, a leg and a few ribs are broken. Her most notable injury is half of her skull being crushed in.

### Unusual Blood Splatters (Seika Mochizuki)

There seems to be blood on Seika's hands and front that is drier than the rest.

### Open Fuse Box (Storeroom)

At the back of the room is a fuse box which has been left open, the switch inside has been flicked to cut the power.

### Illegible Note (Storeroom)

There's a crumbled, bloodied note that seems to have been thrown into the corner of the room that reads "...eet…the sto…e's ..met…eed to…alk ab… Co…lone…n't tru…any…el…-...o"

### Discarded Knife (Storeroom)

A knife sits beside the blood trail. The blood staining it is surprisingly dry.

### Bloody Pen (Storeroom)

On the floor is a pen, sitting beside a pool of blood.

### Shiny Object (Storeroom)

Not too far from the fuse box is a small, circular object discarded on the floor. What the object is is difficult to distinguish due to the blood that stains it, but it shines when put under light.

## Closing Argument

The case began with Seika. For a reason that remains unknown to the living, she set out to kill two people.

Seika targeted Ása in the Theatre and, after a fight that backed Ása into the projection room, she stabbed her multiple times in the chest. During Ása's attempt to escape Seika, Tomo's films were scattered across the floor. Seika collected them up but accidentally got blood on them. She tried to get the blood off, but only made it worse.

After finishing in the Theatre, Seika, having overheard discussion of what had happened in the Storeroom not long before, wrote a fake note, supposedly from Cho, and slid it under the Carriage I door for Shujin.

Shujin soon received the note and left for the Storeroom. When he entered he thought he was alone so he turned to leave. That's when Seika attempted to stab him. She had been hidden behind the door when he came in and had silently closed it behind him.

At the time of the attempted murder, Cho was on his way to the Storeroom in search of a new notebook to replace one that he had filled. This led to him walking in on Seika attempting to kill Shujin. Cho reacted immediately and pushed Seika away from Shujin and into some shelves. Due to the suddenness of the situation, Cho hadn't had time to notice how unsteady and close to collapse the shelves were. When Seika hit the shelves, the added weight caused them to give way and the shelves and their contents crushed Seika. This made Cho the Blackened of this case.

Shujin and Cho, both in shock from the horribly unlucky accident, struggled to accept what had just occurred. Eventually the two chose to tamper with the crime scene and Cho put together a plan to cover up their involvement in the crime. In Cho's case, his motivation to tamper with the crime was to hide Shujin's involvement but also the hope that he could fight his fate for even a little longer.

The first thing he did was take the largest remaining piece of the shelf to block up the door to prevent anyone from walking in before asking Shujin to stain Seika's note with blood to make it mostly illegible and throw it into the corner of the room. He then decided on tying a rope to a place in the roof on either side of the room, splitting the car into two halves, the entrance and the back of the room. The act of tying the two ends of the rope was divided between the two of them, Cho tying the tighter knot of the right and Shujin the looser one of the left.

Cho then took all the books he could find to stack in a pile near one end of the rope with the intention to frame either Randhir or someone smaller who would need to use the books to reach up and tie the rope. While gathering the books he found a hardcover dictionary which he decided to stain with Seika's blood in a certain way to see if he could mislead everyone on the murder weapon.

Once that part of the set up was complete, Cho threw a piece of cloth to Shujin so he could clean the blood off himself, specifically any on his shoes, before Cho uncovered the body and dragged it across to the back of the room while using the blood trail to cover the footprints that had been left across the floor so that no-one would uncover that there had been two of them at the crime scene.

The final step of the plan was to throw a large tablecloth over the rope to act as a curtain to hide the body from sight. This curtain was intended to draw suspicion to someone such as Fubuki or Tomo while making it look as if the body was moved in an attempt to hide it.

Since moving the body, Cho kept to the blood trail to avoid leaving more footprints as he wouldn't be able to move the body twice without drawing suspicion. He only left the trail when Shujin handed him the cloth and he cleaned the blood from his shoes.

During the set up two objects ended up out of place. These being the knife and the pen. The knife had been lost in the pile when the shelves collapsed on Seika, but was dragged along with the body for a short distance. The pen was accidentally dropped as Cho had been taking notes as he went along with the set up.

At some point while setting up the crime scene, Cho had noticed the drier blood on Seika's hands and came to the conclusion that Seika had killed someone else, leaving the two to cover up two crimes. Cho knew that finding and tampering with the other crime scene could cause more harm than good, so he decided not to bother with it.

The final part of the cover up was when Cho called for Mononaishi to ask them to turn out all the lights on the train, but Mononaishi refused to do so. This led to Cho having to resort to his plan B by returning to the back of the room and cutting off the power from the fuse box. To get back over there and secure his exit, even in the dark, he took the curtain at the point where it hung over the blood trail and hooked it over the rope. Despite all of his work so far, he could not avoid leaving footprints when he approached the fuse box.

As soon as the lights went out, Shujin left the room. Cho followed behind, moving back along the blood trail. He put the curtain back into place as he left along with kicking the cloth aside after cleaning the blood off of his shoes again on the way out. What Cho did not realise was that one of the buttons from the sleeve of his coat had fallen off near the fuse box, leaving identifying evidence at the crime scene.

Using the cover of the darkness, they escaped back to Carriage F to clean up from the blood that had spilled on their clothes before joining the others as if nothing had happened.

## Trivia

* This case was fully roleplayed out in private between Admin Onyx and Admin Stone.
* This case had the most truth bullets of any case in TTN, coming in at a total of 16. A whole 11 more than previous cases with the following case having a similar yet still lower number.
* An earlier version of this case would have had Cho coming to the conclusion that there was no outside world left to return to and after killing someone in an accident he would have covered it up and tried to win the trial to kill everyone as a mercy so there could be no more betrayal over something that wasn't worth fighting for. This idea was scraped when the idea of Shujin's involvement was considered.