"Mr. Agne, if I may..." Althea muttered, looking directly at him. "Whatever may have happened, it doesn't make you a bad person. Even, even if it wasn't self defense, you're not a bad person!" she repeated. "Just, that's, what I think. I'm sorry this is happening..."

Annabella quickly changed her votes, then turned directly to Eli. She didn't say anything, only giving him a cold glare.

[A majority has been reached. Please hold. Your call is very important to us.]

Trial MVPs: Evelyn, Althea. Honorary MVP: Eli

"...Ahahaha! I guess all that talk about good and evil...it means nothing anymore, right? I mean...imagine...two killers for something so stupid..."

He wiped some tears away. "Someone llikeme...theres no way I could be pure."

"So...all that really was for nothing?" Evelyn sighed, quite disappointed. "At..at least Hoshiko had her sister's best interests in mind, but... to think Kyoya would have died over something so petty is...well, quite disappointing. He was so helpful too..." She looked down, taking off her kerchief.

"But, erm... Nicos?" She looked up again. "Thank you for at least trying to fix my monocle. I, er, I really do appreciate it."

---

"It was my fault anyways, wasn't it..?" Nicos laughed, sadness threatening to break through his voice. "All these mistakes were bound to catch up to me eventually..."

"In the end though, I was the villain, you know..? I could have confessed at any time. The rules changed, after all. If you guys actually voted for Nana, then she would have faced that punishment I wanted to avoid so desperately..."

He put his hand to his face, mimicking a mask. "In the end, I let myself give into evil. So you all don't need to feel bad for me..."

Taylor was speechless. He simply looked down, opening his mouth, but no words escaped.

Quickly wiping his eyes, he looked up at his old roommate -- the swordsman. "I... I'm sorry this happened, Nicos," he said. Rather than keeping a stoic demeanor, his voice noticably cracked as he spoke, and his eyes watered up. "And -- And the same to you, Eli."

Yeah, he was definitely holding back a torrent of tears.

"Aww, Little T...don't be sorry," Nicos cried. "I'm the worst kind of person...like I said, I held the crime inside me for *my* own sake..."

"No, that's not true! It's not, it's not, stop saying it is!" Althea yelled. "This, this might be your fault, but that doesn't make you a bad person! It's because of Eve, it's because of this game that you did that!"
She sobbed. At some point during that, she started crying. "I, I know we never really talked that much, we weren't ever that close, but... I still consider you my friend, Mr. Agne. You're, you're still my friend, you're still a good person..." she wailed.

"I just...I just want this to end. I'm so tired.." Rose murmurs before doing nothing because the vote already happened.

"T-Thanks Althea..." Nicos smiled. "...but I'm not a good person...even before this game..."

"Yes, yes...please, don't blame yourself any longer", Evelyn murmured tiredly. "You didn't deserve this fate anyway...none of us did. Not you, not Hoshiko, not Kyoya...not even you, Eli." She suddenly turned to him and gave him a solemn look.

"Eli... I may not understand what you did, nor do I like it. But...you were undeniably useful out here today. You gave us much advice regarding Hoshiko's murder and even managed to solve how it happened. Even though you were behind a murder today, you still gave your all when it came to the other. You...even helped me. That colourful candyland murder", she suddenly said. "You helped me, taught me to become a detective and made me realise the process of deduction. That is why...even despite the crime you committed today, you shall eternally have my respect... Sir." She quietly gave a salute in his direction. "I shall never forget your lesson as long as I live. I... I promise to put what you taught me to use if there's ever another trial again. That....I can guarantee. So...thank you for everything you taught me as a detective. I truly did appreciate all you did for us here."

---

"Don't say that!" Honda suddenly exclaimed. "What about that village you told me that you saved? Surely they don't think you're a bad person!"

Annabella didn't have anything to say. She stood at her podium, thinking over something. She looked up at Eli a couple times, but always stopped herself before she said anything.

The third time she looked up, however, she finally spoke. "E-Eli? You're smart, r-right? You're a d-detective. I-I've been trying to solve a m-mystery myself, and-d I think...I think...I have an answer. B-But I wanted to ch-check with you first...

"The reason...th-the reason I've been acting like this a-all trial...it's b-because K-Kyoya died...right? Y-You guys all acted l-like this when Vic and Siri and the others-s died. I-Is that it? Is that why I'm like this-s?"

"C'mon, Honda...that's not enough..."

Nicos rubbed the back of his head. "Besides, I killed Nana's sister..! And kept quiet about it -- who would do that but me..?"

"Any of us! Any of us could have done that!" Althea shrieked. "It's, that's true for Mr. Miller too. We can't blame each other for all that's happening, we can't act like this isn't all her doing!" she pointed at the monitor. No offense meant to Gawain, I'm sure. He's a cool dude.
"If, if you're so terrible, then what am I...? If you're going to say these horrible things about yourself, then you should call me out too! I won't accept what you're saying if you're not prepared to call me a monster too!"

Eli had fallen silent after the verdict, staring at Nicos as if he wanted to say something. But it seemed that, for the moment, he'd lost his words. He just leaned over the podium with his hands folded as if in prayer, and rested his head against them.



"I'm...I'm glad to hear that." Despite everything, Eli smiled. "It's good to know I left some sorta positive impact behind...I'd tell ya' you have potential...but that's what people told me, and I ended up here."

Eli looked up to the coroner with weary eyes. "But it seems to me like you got what it takes to adapt to hardship. And in a world like this, that's often what's more valuable."



"...Yes, I'm sure of it," Eli slowly replied. "And there ain't nothin' wrong with that...Grief and pain...That's what separates us from the robots they build in factories."

Eli let out a sigh as he stood up straight again. He reached up to his hat and pulled it off, revealing the wires of the head-mounted display trailing through his twisted brown hair. He solemnly held the white hat over his heart.

"Kyoya..." he said, "He was probably the only one who understood what I'd been through. ...But I don't think he let it bring him down. He grew up hungry, and yet he dedicated his life to feedin' other people...And he brought that infectious enthusiasm that made everything seem less painful. Y'know...it reminded me a lot of Ryan."

Eli turned over his hat and took off the small cross-shaped broach. "Everyone could always feel his loss. It was like the whole neighborhood was just missing a huge chunk of it. I have a feelin' that it'll be the same for Kyoya. He was the kinda person that always put somethin' positive into the world..."

Eli closed his eyes. "And I guess I'm the asshole that took him out of it..."

---

"H-Heh! What is it, Eli..? Looks like we're both the same. Some people just can't let go of the past, huh..?"

With Eli's words, Annabella's last barrier broke and she dropped to her knees, burying her face in her doll's hair and sobbing loudly.

"No...I don't guess I can," Eli replied, holding the broach in front of him. "Solving Ryan's murder...everyone said that was my purpose. I guess they thought it would fix everything...like knowin' who to send the mob after would keep us from tearing ourselves apart."

"But it don't look like I have the time left. That case...it swallowed up me, the police force, everyone. Not even Kyoya was safe. Even when my brain has been shoved up into that program...I wonder if I'll truly be free of it."

---

Nicos began to cry a little bit, realizing the punishment ahead of him.

"I guess that's a difference between us. The past holds me down, but I don't ever wanna forget it..."

He struggled to hold his tears back. "F-Forgetting about who and what made me the person I am today...I-I wouldn't wish that on anyone..."

Forcing a laugh out, he slowly took Akrasia and held it in his hands. He stared at it sadly, knowing everything he had ever felt about his lover would soon disappear. "But that's what happens when you lose this game, I guess..."

Nana just stared off into space, expressionless. It was hard to tell if she was even breathing.

---

"Nana..." Nicos choked, almost unable to face her. "I...took your sister away...that's a sin I'll never get over...but you should know that your sister died for you. I don't know if that helps, at all...I think she felt like she needed to do something..."

"...I know platitudes don't mean much in the end," Eli slowly added, "But I'm sure your sis woulda wanted you to keep your head up, Nana. She wanted you to live, and lettin' yourself wither away ain't no way to live."

"And that goes for all of y'all...You've got everyone's hopes ridin' on you...So don't back down now."

---

"...Shut up."

Nana continued looking at nothing as she spoke, her voice as hollow as her expression. Her arms hung at her sides like a puppet without strings. "'Keep my head up'? ...How can I do that when I'm hurting this much?"

She wasn't crying anymore. Perhaps she'd run out of tears.

"...Sis meant everything to me. We've always gotten along. We've always been together. Even when Mom and Dad had to move to do their work, I was okay with it because I knew Sis would be with me. Even when she was busy with her own work, she still did her best to spend time with me when she could. I knew her better than anyone... I thought I did, anyway..."

It seemed she found a few tears left within her after all; they'd begun to pool in the corners of her eyes. "...How could she do something like this? Dad's company failing would suck... but he wouldn't want to save it if she had to die to make it happen. I want to go home, too... but not if it meant I'd never see her again... I loved Sis more than anyone in the world... and now she's gone forever... It hurts so, so much... It's like I can't feel anything but the hurt... Everyone always told me I was lucky, that nothing bad ever happened to me... Is this what it's like...?"

As she blinked, her cheeks dampened again. "...Mr. Kyoya's gone, too. His sister won't ever see him again, either... I didn't get to know him as well as I wanted, but... I know she'll hurt like this when she finds out, too... I feel so sorry for her..."

---

"You thought you did..?" Nicos asked.

Suddenly, he was overwhelmed with emotion. An emotion that Nana surely didn't care to see, but Nicos couldn't keep it in.

"You knew her better than anyone here, you gotta know that..! And you meant everything to her, too! Don't you know that..? Why else would she die for you..? She died *for you!* And she doesn't want you to feel sorry for her! She died with a smile, right in my arms..! Punch, scream, and hate me all you want! But you're gonna know that your sister died loving you..!"

Nicos lowered his head bashfully, trying to hide his tears. "Y-You understand me, Nana..?"

"...I know she did..." Nana breathed. She lowered her head and leaned limply against her podium. "That's why it hurts so much..."

---

Evelyn didn't have anything else to say. Seeing Nana's emotionless expression, she looked down solemnly as if she were at a funeral. She didn't cry either, though. She seemed to have run out of tears as well.

---

"Probably best to just leave her be..." Eli mumbled.

He turned to the floor and shook his head. "...I can only hope my brothers'll be fine without me..."

---

Eli sighed. "I suppose you all deserve a proper explanation."

Every detective has a case that haunts them. Maybe it's the case they were never able to solve, when they let some twisted murderer go free. Or maybe it's the case that exposed them firsthand to the abject depravity humans are capable of. Or maybe it's the one that always seemed just a little too easy, like something dark and evil was hiding under the surface.

"The case that keeps me up at night...They call it the Sheffield Case," Eli began dourly.

"I told you about Ryan before. A beacon of light in dark times, they called him. Proud, funny, charisma almost in excess. He had a great future ahead of him, an' it inspired the rest of us too.

"Then... then they found him hanging from the ceiling in his bedroom one day.

"'Course, no-one could believe it was a suicide. Ryan, see, he was a friend of the little folk, but he was very outspoken against large corporations. Probably had all kinds of enemies. Would be right up their alley to bump him off and make it look like suicide. Alabaster had a file on him too, keepin' tabs, wouldn't surprise me if they were involved after all we've seen here..."

He looked around at the other students before continuing. "Still, whoever did it, they sure knew what they were doing. Set up a proper closed room mystery, baffled the small police force responsible for that neighbourhood. There were only two ways in and out of his apartment: a window and the front door. No-one coulda used the window, the apartment was on the fifth floor an' was designed to keep burglars and the like out anyway. That only left the door, but it was locked of course. Locked from the inside, as a matter of fact, with the key still in the door.

"They found drugs in his blood. A certain black market painkiller. Dangerous stuff, illegal for a reason. Just one pill's enough to numb you for hours, three pills could knock a guy flat and any more than five would kill ya. They couldn't determine how much was in him, exactly. Somewhere between one or three, so we couldn't tell if he was merely anaesthetised or unconscious. We never found the pill box, guess the killer took it to hide the evidence. Presumably the killer had drugged his drink to knock him out, though.

"His guardian was out for the night. Gambling. Anyone who knew Ryan knew they could rely on them being away for a long while, plenty of time to kill him. That left three suspects, in the end.

"There was the landlord. A mean old miser, wouldn't surprise me if he took a large payment to do it. He actually had a meeting with Ryan's guardian on the day it happened, but he didn't have a key to get in.

"Then there was the cleaner. Seemed a nice enough girl, but this business opens you up to the worst of people sometimes... She had a spare key for the door. However there didn't seem to be a way for her to set up the 'closed room' aspect: if she left an' locked the door behind her, there'd be no way for Ryan's key to end up in the lock on the other side. Plus if she put the key in the lock on the outside to open it, it woulda pushed the other key out.

"Finally there was Pete. Ryan's best friend, had pretty similar views to him but lacked his charm and energy. The guy never trusted hospitals, was very anti-establishment, so he'd lost an arm a while back and nothing got done about it. Him and Ryan had this system where Pete could use a magnet on Ryan's key, which was set up with a magnet of its own, to open and close the door so he could come chat whenever. Perfect way to set up the locked room. However his single arm was always a liability... he'd have found it pretty difficult to hang Ryan even if he was unconscious, and it would have been downright impossible if Ryan was awake and could fight back. Plus we never found any signs of a fight...

"Lastly..." Eli continued wearily, "there was this pickup truck. Was always a bit suspicious, parked out below Ryan's window most of the time but no-one knew who it belonged to. After Ryan was found dead the truck had vanished, and we never had the resources to track it down; we were only a small-time force, and we could never find any link between it and the crime. And... that was that. We never made any progress past that point. Pete was the most suspicious, but we could never get anything conclusive on the guy..."

Finishing his account of the case, Eli breathed a sigh of relief. It looked like he had, only slightly, lessened the weight on his shoulders by sharing it.

"Interesting... A pickup truck, you say?" Gawain repeated thoughtfully. "As it so happens, I have records of such a truck right here! It seems it belonged to an Alabaster employee, you see, who'd been sent there to keep a careful eye on Ryan in case he tried anything too extreme. This employee had driven off after finding out Ryan was dead as he didn't want to get involved and drag Alabaster into it. He also reported something strange when he returned to base: a packet of pills had fallen into the back of his truck, he only found them after he'd parked up at base. Apparently Ryan had a fondness for leaning out his window and watching the world from there, so he might have simply dropped it. And it says here that only one pill was taken from the box. What do you make of that?"

Eli stared at Gawain's monitor with an unreadable expression; only his unstable breathing betrayed his reaction to the new information.

Evelyn became a little agitated. "With this new piece of evidence, does that mean the case can be solved at long last?" she asked. "We may not be police, but it's worth a try, yes?"

[As this isn't an official case or anything, spectators can help solve the mystery too if they'd like. And just so it's clear, there isn't that much to solve here, you probably won't need to ask for extra information or anything.]

“Well, doesn’t that last bit strongly imply it was a suicide?” Skylar asked. “If one pill numbs you for three hours, then he probably just took one and looked out the window for one last view of the world, only to painlessly hang himself in the end.”

"Y-You're kidding me...Alabaster was there the whole damn time..." Eli mumbled. He leaned over the podium with desperation in his eyes, as if nothing at all had changed. "Could they have been responsible...? B-But...there's no way they could have gotten in, unless they paid somebody off..."

Eli's head snapped up at Skylar's comment. "What, suicide? No...there's no way..." He trailed off uncertainly.

---

"Um, that does seem to be the conclusion here, regrettably..." Althea muttered. "The only other possibility would be that this Mr. Pete had help to do it, but would he really conspire to kill a close friend?"

"Although..." she continued in an extension of this post that definitely was here from the start. "Could it be a homicide followed by a suicide? I mean, if the killer jumped out of the window into the pickup, taking the pill to go out painlessly, that would imply Alabaster, correct? Then they used the truck to get away with the body of the killer..."

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“The suicide makes the most sense, though,” Skylar said quietly to herself, not wanting to upset the dead man walking.

Eli put his hand to his forehead, a look of horror on his face.

"N-No! There's got to be somethin' we're overlooking!" He said, the composure gone from his voice. "G-Gawain! There's gotta be something else that Alabaster dude withheld, right?"

"Ryan was the strongest of any of us! He wouldn't have killed himself...Besides, there was no suicide note on the scene. U-Unless..." Eli looked aside, deep in thought.

---

“Eli... you know suicide notes are incredibly uncommon, right? It’s mostly a trope works of fiction use to convey information to the audience. Most real people just... don’t.”

"The Alabaster employee wouldn't have withheld information for Alabaster's private logs, as there'd be no need. If Alabaster were involved, there would be information about it here. And I'm not lying to you all or withholding information, all I want is the best for you all. I'm sorry, Eli..." Gawain said.

"So...is that it?" Evelyn asked incredulously. "Was it just a misunderstanding after all? But then, why on earth would Ryan commit suicide? It makes little to no sense..."

---

“W-Well, if there was a suicide note, it must be gone now,” Eli mumbled, “I remember…Ryan’s father was the first who found the body. For such a pillar of the community to commit suicide like that…I’m sure he thought it musta been too much for everyone to handle.”

“But…why would he kill himself?!” Eli shouted, running his hand through his hair. “He was the one keepin’ everyone together, and he didn’t have a single person to talk to? Our people were supposed to support each other! To have each other’s backs! Ryan, he had so much promise! So much potential!”

His voice had been speeding up as he talked, spiralling into a crescendo. Finally, Eli closed his eyes and let out a cry of rage. In a brief burst of violence he threw his hat over the podium, where it landed in the center of the room with a pathetic thump. Then he stared at it, breathing in and out, trying to sort through his emotions.

Eventually, he sighed. “I remember…Mama’d always blame the rich folk for our problems…but then again, so did everyone…Maybe that’s what Ryan figured out…why he took his own life. I guess our greatest enemy…was ourselves.”

Eli rested his hands on the podium. “I guess that’s what happens when you live in darkness. You take on a little bit of it yourselves.”

“Y’know, senseless violence just leads to more violence. There’s no algorithm to it…It just swallows everyone up until we’re all run dry. I grew up with it all around me, and I thought I’d escaped it. But I guess that darkness is still within me…and there’s only so much a man like that can take.”

Eli shook his head and looked up to the others. “…Maybe it’s for the best that this all stays buried here. Y’all…I think maybe you’ve got a chance now…to end this cycle of violence we’ve been stuck in. I’m sure it won’t be easy…but I know none of y’all are prepared to just give up, right? I mean…you managed to smoke me out.”

“I know it don’t mean much at all…but my prayers are with ya’.”

Eli tried to smile reassuringly, but his eyes were tightly shut. Perhaps he didn’t want to see what the light would show him.

---

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