Saturday, October 25th, 2028

  Day 3

  Chapter 3: Two Nightmares

  13/14 Alive

  Xavier Ronaro, the elite football pyer, was on the ground with the skewer stabbed through his back. Dead. I let out a scream, and people scrambled towards the body. After a few screams were let out, I excimed, “It was you, Samael! You Killed him!” He simply ughed. “Ah, that’s what you would think, isn’t it? Wrong! Beyond wrong! One of you… Has decided to kill! Things are getting exciting! Things are getting very exciting indeed!” Xavier was dead, but one of us seriously killed him? Why? And for money, of all things! I ran around, desperately looking for other people.

  As I exited the bathroom, I found another student, Sky Turner, the elite illusionist, who was also exiting, but through the women’s side. “What happened? I saw a bckout occur, but-” I cut her off. “Xavier’s dead.” “What? How? Did one of us-” I cut her off. “Please stop panicking. You too, are a prime suspect. You, Brady, and Aisha. You all were missing after the outage stopped.” “What? No! I would never kill anyone!” “It doesn’t matter what you say. If what you’re saying is true, it’ll come out when we investigate. For now, help me find Aisha and Brady.” “Fine.”

  I eventually found Aisha running through the halls, looking for Brady. She had already been informed by Faye about the entire situation, so I didn’t bother talking to her. All that was left to find was Brady. We eventually all ended up in the cafeteria again, and Aaron spoke up, Jack beside him. “We can’t find Brady anywhere. We searched every room.” “Even the electrical room?” I say. “Maybe he tried to reset the power.” We all scrambled into the electrical room adjacent to the cafeteria, where the door was already slightly ajar. I turned my head into the entryway and saw a sight I couldn’t unsee. I wanted to, but… in the left corner of the room was a gss bottle, completely shattered. Next to the gss… Was Brady’s lifeless body.

  Everyone let out a scream at the sight of the massive bloody gash on the side of his head. Brady died too? Someone was bloodthirsty enough to kill them both? How? Nobody in the room seemed to be that way, well, maybe Landon Robinson, who only spoke to us on day one, but why would he kill? And he never even showed any signs of suspicion, though he did not show any signs of empathy for the victims. But everyone was doing a damn good job at hiding that they would have known anything about it. Faye Burns, who seemed to be the quiet type, was now unable to do anything but cry. It makes sense, I thought. It’s only natural for someone to freak out like this during a time when two of your friends die. But who killed them?

  It was then I noticed something odd. When Brady slipped the switchbde into his pocket, it stuck out a tiny bit, showing a bit of a sparkle. Now, the bde was not visible in his pocket. “Where’s the switchbde?” I say. Everyone crowded around the body and searched his pockets. “It’s not here!” Says Faye. “It’s gone!” Panic was at an all-time high, and everyone was freaking out, getting away from one another to make sure nobody would stab them. After it was determined that nobody actually had the switchbde, Samael spoke again. “Now then! Since you have found both bodies, you may now start to investigate! You have 3 hours until the trial. Good Luck!”

  Everyone besides Aaron and Jack was still panicking. When I got them to calm down, I eventually spoke. “Let’s go over what we do know. It’s obvious that the killer triggered a power outage when no one was paying attention and killed Xavier with a skewer from st night’s feast. After that, Brady probably went to go save the day by turning on the power, but the killer probably knew that Brady saw them kill and killed him for no witnesses to be left using the shattered gss bottle. During that time, the switchbde was likely stolen.” We know all that already,” Jack said, annoyed. “Let’s hurry the hell up and investigate, people. We ain’t got no time to waste.”

  It's only been 3 days and I already hate this guy’s guts, yet we listened and started searching the body of Xavier Ronaro. I was uncomfortable touching a dead body, but Jack and Aaron leapt onto him and searched. “Wait a second,” Aaron said, skeptical. There’s no way this skewer is in this guy’s body enough to have killed him.” And he was right. The skewer was maybe half an inch into his body, and there wasn’t much blood. However, when we turned the body around, the true murder weapon was revealed. Stabbed through his chest…. Was Brady Young’s switchbde.

  So the switchbde was stolen before Xavier was killed? Or maybe Brady was killed first… yes, that would make sense.

  That was all we did for Xavier’s body, so we then moved on to Brady’s. It was less bloody, sure, but the head wound was terrible to look at. It looked as though it had been stabbed rather than hit. As we checked him, we noticed something in his hand. It was a piece of fabric, but it was bck and looked burnt, so that’s what we assumed. On his other hand was a blood sptter. “That’s weird,” I said. “How did that happen?” Landon, who had already started looking, stared at the shattered bottle, likely wanting to say something. He then looked at Brady, and moved his body. To our surprise, under his body y two ships, each with a different color on each sail. Probably for the first time in his life, Landon smiled. “These ships,” he started, “are from different rooms. They’re ship-in-a-bottles. You see the one with the white sail? That signifies water being in the bottle, which is exclusively in the cafeteria, so the killer obviously grabbed the bottle from there. The one with the brown sail, however, is alcohol, which I’m sure you’ll be intrigued to hear is exclusively in the rec room, connected to the electrical room.”

  Sure enough, when we went into the rec room, one of the alcoholic bottles was missing. “So, the killer’s pn ultimately failed, and they grabbed another one from here,” Landon said. “And that’s when the killer delivered the final blow. If you look at the shattered gss, it almost looks like there are two piles. That’s because they are. It wasn’t just one bottle. It was two.” I walked over to a wet spot in the carpet. “Why is this wet spot so far from the body?” I sniffed the air. “And it’s definitely alcohol.” After that, we walked over to check the water bottles in the cafeteria. Sure enough, inside each one was a white sail, as well as a missing bottle. But when I started walking Landon stopped me. “The flour,” he said softly, then increased in volume. “The flour! There’s a sneaker footprint in the flour Tristan spilt on the ground!” “I’m cutting you off there!” Samael was back. “It’s time to start the css trial! Everyone, cssroom 502. Now!” The investigation was over. All I could do was pray we had a sufficient amount of evidence to solve the murders of Brady and Xavier.