Everyone quickly hurries over, dreading what they might be about to see. However, nothing prepares them for the reality of it.

Lifeless limbs in a pool of blood are all that can be seen of her, as the rest of her body and one of her legs are crushed under two large storage containers. Even then, there’s no denying who it is; only one student here wore those bangles. Siri Hall, the Ultimate Motivational Speaker, is dead.

“Siri!”
“Oh my God, is she alright?”
“Doctor, we need a doctor over here!”

The Ultimates erupted into a rabble of panicked, confused voices. Some started crying while others tried to get everyone to calm down, to little avail. In the end, it was the most unlikely of sources that silenced everyone: Nina arriving late, hands comfortably behind her head.

“Oh, hey, what’s this?” she said with apparent interest, looking at the body. “I don’t want to push my luck, but is she actually dead?”
“There’s… no doubt about it,” Evelyn confirmed, as Marshall and Nicos struggled to lift the storage containers out of the way. “We are looking at Siri’s corpse.” She was focused quite intensely on the grisly sight before her, immediately ready to examine the scene.

“Damn it, no signal,” Eli cursed, having tried to contact the authorities. “And the Wi-Fi’s out on the train, too.”
“Where were you, Nina? And how can you act this way when someone just died?” Rose exclaimed, busily spraying herself with some kind of perfume that appeared to be helping keep her calm. “Are you really that much of a freak?”
“Maybe I am,” Nina shrugged, unconcerned. “And for your information, I was tending to the wounds I got during the crash. Figured I’d only get in your way otherwise.”

Before anyone could retort, Nana spoke up shakily, a worried thought popping into her head. “H-hey… where’s Eve? Is she m-missing too? What if-”
“Eve is safe and sound,” Nicos interjected, before Nana could work herself up. Even he seemed in low spirits. “She’s in the driver’s car still.”
“We should tell her what’s going on, immediately,” Nick decided, heading away from the carriage. “Come on, guys, you shouldn’t stay here.”

Leaving Evelyn to her investigation, the group trudged off for the other end of the train. Some tried to comfort each other, while others kept to themselves, not wanting to talk to anyone. Upon arrival, Nick called out to Eve.

In answer, a heavy thud came from the other side of the door. The impact was followed by a few others, until Eve succeeded in smashing the jammed door right out of the train, it landing in a dented heap a few feet away. As she emerged from the smoking interior, some of the students gasped in shock: something clearly wasn’t right with the girl.

Bits of her skin were ripped, but rather than bleeding, cold metal could be seen gleaming underneath. Parts of her body seemed a bit out of place, and sparks would periodically come bursting out of the openings left behind. Topping it all off, her eyes had started to glow a deep, slightly crazed red. “Geez, that was a heck of a ride, wasn’t it? I knew trains weren’t to be trusted!” she said, examining her blazer in distaste. With a sudden scowl, she tore the tattered piece of clothing right off.

“E-Eve…? What… happened? Is this more magic?” Nana asked in a trembling voice.
“Huh? Is what…?” Eve began, before catching sight of her reflection in a still-intact train window. “Oh. Whoops! Oh well, I didn’t need the disguise anymore anyway!”
“So you’re a robot, then?” Eli queried, not seeming too surprised. “Sorry, but, we have more important things to be worryin’ about. Siri’s dead.”

“Dead?” Eve exclaimed, utterly delighted. “Wow, you guys work fast! I didn’t even need to announce anything yet!” The Ultimates all looked at each other in surprise, but before they could reply, Eve strode forwards. “Come on, come on, show me, show me!” Not seeing much alternative, everyone returned to the scene.

Once there, Eve nodded knowingly. “Yup. No doubt about. We got our first victim! Woohoo, how exciting!”
“Hey! Have some respect!” Marshall demanded, glaring at the robot girl. “This isn’t one of your games!”
This caused Eve to laugh girlishly. “See, now, that’s where you’re wrong. This is just the beginning; the beginning of the Killing Game!

“Now, I’ll leave those fun details for later. Right now, we’ve got a trial on our hands!” she declared exuberantly. With a snap of her fingers, there was a sudden bustle of activity inside the storage car, as various containers opened up and revealed strange, spider-like machines that began advancing on the startled Ultimates. “We’re not even at the Alabaster facility yet, so we can’t use the trial grounds I had specially made… we’ll just have to make do with this!”

Quite horrified, the Ultimates scattered, some running, some trying to fight the robots off, a few simply accepting their fate. It didn’t seem to matter much, as they were no match for the powerful machines. Soon each and every one of them found themselves standing on top of one of the spider bots, shackles holding them in place. The robots then marched a short distance from the train, arranging themselves in a circle that allowed everyone to face each other. Eve remained standing on the sidelines, grinning devilishly.

“You cannot keep us trapped for long, witch! Akrasia and I shall find a way out of this situation!” Nicos declared, struggling fruitlessly.
“Hey, all the power to ya if you can, that’d be hilarious,” Eve replied lightly, roaming the perimeter. “Now! The rules. Rules are boring, but necessary, so listen up. I don’t really feel like repeating myself.

”It’s simple, really,” Eve began, the atmosphere of the clearing becoming strange all of a sudden. “Your job is to find out who did it! Who killed Siri!”
“W-wait, killed? It wasn’t an accident?” Althea exclaimed, craning her head to look at Eve.
“Oh. I mean, might’ve been,” Eve said, a little surprised. “Would be the boring answer, but maybe! Up to all of you guys to figure that out. See, the crux of this Killing Game is that, if you guys don’t identify the killer, they get to go free! They get to leave this mess and go back home, safe and sound. But when they do, I’ll have one of you executed in their place!”

She raised her hands as everyone began to speak up at once. “Now, now, them’s just the rules, I don’t make them. Genius idea though, really! Gotta appreciate the classics. So yeah, it’s up to you guys to stop that happening. Once at least two thirds of you have voted, if you get it right, the killer will receive a suitable punishment, the rest of you will go unscathed, and we can move on with our happy Killing Game lives! Sound fun?”

“Screw that! Why should we go along with something as messed up as that?” Taylor exclaimed.
“You’ve no choice, really. Do or die,” Eve explained simply, shrugging. “I don’t really care what you choose, both options sound fun to me!”
“You can’t be expecting us to solve a crime without investigating,” Eli spoke up, taking the situation in his stride. “Your ‘Killing Game’ makes no sense if we don’t get a fighting chance, right?”
“Oh, sure, sure, usually that’d be the case. But I’m worried you’ll all run off if I let you go do that,” Eve replied. “Besides, I think you’ve got plenty to go off of. You all searched that train top to bottom when you were looking for everyone and putting out that fire. And as for the body, Evelyn got a good, long look at her, didn’t you, other Evelyn?”

Evelyn jumped in surprise at the direct addressal. “Er, yes! Quite an interesting corpse, if I do say so myself. We don’t often get any like it back at the office, too difficult to extract from the scene due to how crushed up-”
“Yeah, we get it. Just tell us the important parts,” Marshal interjected.
“Right. Well, cause of death seemed to be being crushed by a large, heavy object.”
“Well, duh. Don’t need qualifications to see that,” Skylar snapped, looking a little queasy.

“I say ‘seemed’ because it’s hard to say for sure,” Evelyn continued unabashed. “The damage caused by the storage unit would have covered for any other injuries she might have had to her person. At the very least, I saw that one of her legs was bruised; that would have been the second container that was on her. Her arms and other leg were uninjured, and otherwise there wasn’t anything unusual I could find.”

“If I might add something,” Eli began, already tapping away at something on his holographic projection, “I also had a quick look ‘round the scene, before… well.” He threw an irritated glance at Eve before continuing. “The container on her leg was just one of the many in the carriage, but the one that crushed her body was particularly heavy. There were three marks on the wall next to it, possibly originally holding struts that could support such a weight. I didn’t get a chance to look for them, but, I did notice the two outer marks seemed weird: the middle one was all clean, but the left and right were all… scratched up, I guess?”

“There, see, you’re all off to a great start already!” Eve cheered. “Next up, testimony time! Just tell everyone what you were up to today. I’ll even go first, give you an example.” Before she could begin, however, a small monitor on one of the spider bots lit up, and Adam’s smiling ‘face’ appeared.
“This is entirely against protocol,” he stated, a hint of distress to his otherwise monotonous voice. “Alabaster Corporation regrets to inform you that they will not stand for this chaos.”
“Oh, Adam, you’re… still here,” Eve said, clearly disappointed. “You’re a stubborn guy, figured I’d gotten rid of every trace of ya. Oh well, you’ll be my witness! You were with me the whole time after all!

”Okay, so, I spent the whole time in the driver’s carriage. I was just so scared, you know, I wanted to chat with Adam to keep my mind off things.”
“Objection! That is a lie,” Adam said, almost sounding angry. “You were hacking my systems.”
“Okay yeah so maybe there was a bit of that too,” Eve conceded. “I spent the whole journey hacking this doofus, taking control of all the train’s systems and trying to get rid of him. Guess I was only partially successful. And then, the train somehow crashed! Like, whoa, what’s with that?”
“It crashed because of your aggressive hacking!”
“Okay, okay, fiiiiiiine. I may have caused a few problems here and there and caused the train to derail. We all make mistakes, alright? Like that guy who made you, like geez, what was he thinking?”

Having finished her testimony, and her tour of the perimeter, Eve came to a stop with two dramatic stamps of her feet. “And there we have it! Just do what I did and you’ll be fine.”

Map:



Evidence Doc: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

Q&A QT: https://www.quicktopic.com/52/H/ZZQ2ktbtepmb

Lifelines
These are special actions you can take to help solve the case. Each lifeline can only be used once throughout the entire game, so use them wisely! Also, lifelines can’t be used to give an answer that would directly identify the culprit, or point too strongly at the culprit.

Hangman’s Gambit: All the characters jointly decide on a question to ask. The answer will be hidden, but each character gets to guess a letter. Two wrong guesses (or multiple, depending on the length of the answer) and the minigame ends. Order can be decided before minigame, but no discussion on which letters to guess can take place.

Rebuttal Showdown/Scrum Debate: Two (or multiple) characters can argue on a point, at the end it’ll be revealed which side was closer to the correct answer.

Climax Reasoning: One character is chosen to put together a numbered list of everything they know about the case (the number of items in the list is determined by the GMs). At the end, they’ll be told how many items were incorrect.

Logic Dive: One player is chosen to answer multiple choice questions about the case privately in a rapid fire manner. It ends when two incorrect answers have been given or the point of discussion for the dive has been resolved.

[Lifelines stolen from F4, where they were stolen from F3]