Danganronpa XVIII: Murder on the Forum Express (The End)

[Gasocea]

"......She liked Ellery, or something...." he sighs, "*sigh*.... so much for stalling..."

The sound of a door being broken down can be heard in the distance.

[LetitiaWilson]

Letitia glances at Paegus, a look of clear contempt on her face as she points the shotgun at the crippled girl.

"Maybe I should shoot her...wouldn't be the first time I've killed someone. Well, not the first time I've killed someone who didn't deserve to die, like your pet dogs did, Christopher. After all, I DID say there is two psychopaths on this train. However -"

Instead of pulling the trigger, she instead puts the shotgun back in her bag.

"I'm nothing like you, Christopher, I only kill those who actually deserve to die,"

[Hawkwing425]

“Well, why don’t we greet our police friends? I know they won’t like me too much, since I’m a thief, but I’m certain they’ll have some sympathy for the rest of you. Except Chrissy.”

[Gasocea]

"Heh. That's what I get I guess. Hers is a toy gun anyway," another door being broken down can be heard along with the sirens from outside, "I locked all the doors before coming here just in case, so that will buy like 10 minutes."

"...Anyway, now that we have some free time, mind helping me think? I will definitely get the death sentence after this, and I really want to know who the angel was..." he struggles a bit from under the two men, "Don't you too? Don't you people want to know who killed your relatives?"

[LetitiaWilson]

"Don't you too? Don't you people want to know who killed your relatives?"[/i]

"Nope,"

[Hawkwing425]

“My best guess would be Mariano Snider, since he disappeared instead of dying. But, what do I care? I’m filler.”

[Gasocea]

"Yes, I know you do! I know you want to know who the killer is!!" he keeps on struggling as two more sounds of doors being forced open are heard, closer this time, "I'm not the culprit!! I won't deny Mariano could be it, but that doesn't explain the locked rooms!!!"

[SuperWeegee]

"Yes, I know you do! I know you want to know who the killer is!!" he keeps on struggling as two more sounds of doors being forced open are heard, closer this time, "I'm not the culprit!! I won't deny Mariano could be it, but that doesn't explain the locked rooms!!!"

"Moving on is something that you are apparently incapable of."

[LetitiaWilson]

"Yes, I know you do! I know you want to know who the killer is!!" he keeps on struggling as two more sounds of doors being forced open are heard, closer this time, "I'm not the culprit!! I won't deny Mariano could be it, but that doesn't explain the locked rooms!!!"

"I still don't care. but one question: Aside from the two outliers - John and Mike - did you even figure out HOW the rest died?"

[Hawkwing425]

"Suicide's an option. For you and them."

[Gasocea]

"Moving on is something that you are apparently incapable of."

"It was either this or accepting my unjustified death!! What do YOU know?! What would YOU have done if you were in my shoes?! That's right: exactly the same thing!"

"I still don't care. but one question: Aside from the two outliers - John and Mike - did you even figure out HOW the rest died?"

"If you mean how they died, most were stabbed except for Frederick and Mia... but if you mean how the locked rooms were done... your guess is as good as mine."

Another door is broken down, and the sound this time is closer than ever. Taking into account the number of carriages, there is probably one single door between you and your saviors.

[SuperWeegee]

"Moving on is something that you are apparently incapable of."

"It was either this or accepting my unjustified death!! What do YOU know?! What would YOU have done if you were in my shoes?! That's right: exactly the same thing!"

"You assume too much."

[Hawkwing425]

Huh, color of the text changed.

[LetitiaWilson]

"Moving on is something that you are apparently incapable of."

"It was either this or accepting my unjustified death!! What do YOU know?! What would YOU have done if you were in my shoes?! That's right: exactly the same thing!"

"Personally, I'd have gone after the ACTUAL angel, not go and murder innocent people. But then, you clearly don't have neither the mental faculties nor the brain power to accomplish that,"

[i]"If you mean how they died, most were stabbed except for Frederick and Mia... but if you mean how the locked rooms were done... your guess is as good as mine."

"Did you even stop to consider that maybe, just maybe, the angel had a master key for the mansion, just like Bryce did? Or did you check for hidden passages?"

[Hawkwing425]

"I like Letitia's train of thought."

[Gasocea]

"I investigated the mansion itself, too. The mansion floor plans did not reveal any secret passages, and I later found out the locks were normal locks and didn't have the pins neccesary for a master key to work... so no master key either..." Justin sighs, "...Either way, it is too late. It was nice meeting you, and I regret not having just killed you all from the start."

The door to the room is broken down, and three, four, five armored officers burst in carrying guns.
You all try explaining to them what has happened at the same time, but Justin takes the chance that Frey and Bryce are distracted to free himself and jump closer to one of the walls. He seems to mess with something, and when one of the officers gets close, a gunshot rings out and the blue cop falls onto the floor, with a bullet wound on the forehead.
Before his partners can react, Justin, still on the floor, reveals a revolver and starts shooting towards you.
One, two, three, four shots.
The bullets fly across the room, towards the group of surprised people.
One of them reaches Bryce. It goes through his chest, and blood starts pouring out of the entry wound. He coughs up blood and collapses.
Another gets to Letitia. It hits her stomatch, which she immediately covers as she groans in pain.
The third and fourth bullets go to Frey, who luckily slips on the flashlight left on the floor and the bullets narrowly miss his skull... and head to Kam'rae. She doesn't get to react as a bullet goes through her open mouth and another through her lung.
Paegus just sits there as all of this happens within seconds. Same with Beau.
Before he can shoot anyone else, the remaining officers aim at Justin and fire... It doesn't take long for him to let go of the revolver and let his arm fall.
...He doesn't die however, and shows off something in his other hand: An actual detonator.... which he doesn't get to press as tens of bullets fly his way.
As some of those reach his head, he closes his eyes and sighs one last time before they enter and go through his brain.

Trial end
Do not post.

[Gasocea]

Aftermath

Years later, in the five year anniversary of the Angel Express Massacre, the survivors sit around a table and talk about their lives. Frey Hardcastle doesn't say anything however, and just takes a sip of his coffee as he reads the two newspapers on said table.

Thirteen dead after massacre in the Angel Express

Sat 6 Oct 2018: Yesterday, the person responsible for the avenging angel massacre a year ago was found to have hijacked a train and killed several people in one of the most horrible killings of the century before getting shot by police himself.

Christopher Barwin (35) escaped hospital in an attempt to avoid trial a year ago. His whereabouts were unknown until, earlier this week, a green haired man named 'Justin Catchpool' bought twelve tickets for a train so he could allegedly 'have the train for himself'. While reviewing security footage after a mugging incident, a friend of his recognized him as Barwin and informed the police.

The police were late, however. Barwin had lured 12 teenagers with promises of enrolment in the prestigious school Hope's Peak Academy and forced them to stay in the train with no way out in a torture that lasted four whole days. Intimidated by four other muscled killers hired by Barwin, the twelve teenagers participated in a horrendous 'game' that involved them killing each other. This 'game' ended with the lives of 6 of them: Markus Tivani (17), Hercule Poirot (13), Zed Duncle (15), Henrik Libidine (18), Phoenix Solalis (17), and David Adams (16).

The staff of the train were also found dead inside the freezer part of it. It was found Barwin murdered them as soon as he got to the train. The two staff were Daniel Goodheart (21) and the driver George Brant (25).

The four hired as guards by Barwin were later killed by one of the participants in an attempt to stop Barwin's plan. They could not be identified, but each of their bodies were found inside the train except for one which was far away from the train's location in the train tracks. The one mentioned last died of a broken neck after being pushed off.

This massacre culminated yesterday in a shootout between Christopher and the police, which ended with his death and the death of Ramiro Malines (45), one of the officers. Three out of the six teenagers left alive were caught in the shootout. They all survived but only barely clinged to life, so they were immediately sent to a hospital. The other three were unharmed, save for one who tripped and hit himself on the head.

"It appears to be a suicide mission," said sheriff Ibney Hope, "We doubt he intended to get out of there alive."
Thanks to the witness reports given by the survivors, the motive of Christopher Barwin is clear: Barwin wanted revenge on the child of the supposed 'actual angel' who committed the murders in the avenging angel massacre. Some of the teenagers however had no relation to the incident and were chosen randomly.

One of our psychologists proposed that his feelings of guilt ended up with him believing he was innocent and started to think one of his victims had done killed everyone.

This is truly a terrible incident that should not have happened, caused by one single mentally ill man.

The Killer That Never Was: The Truth Behind the Avenging Angel Massacre

Sun 6 Oct 2019: I am sure that by this point you know about the two major murder incidents that have happened in these two years. One is the Avenging Angel one, while the other is the Angel Express one.
As you might already know by the article I made about my experience last year, I am a survivor of the second incident. Barwin trapped me and some others and forced us to kill each other... that was not nice, but his motive was understandable, I guess.

The point of this article is not to talk about the latter incident, but rather the Avenging Angel one: because of the poor investigation skills presented by the police, I decided to take matters into my own hands and investigated the whole ordeal along with the private investigator Bryce Jenkins. Thanks to him, we quickly solved the mystery.

The first thing we can confirm as a fact is that everything Christopher said in his diary was true. We compared his story to the actual crime scene and evidence found and eventually had the main investigators agree with us: Christopher Barwin told the truth, meaning he could not be the culprit.

Next, we found skin under Mike Charon's nails. The initial investigators ignored this, but we had them analyze it when we found out. Mike had fought with his killer, so he would naturally have scratched them at one point in their struggle.

5 days later we got our results: the skin belonged to Joanna Thorne. And just like that, we got our culprit.

We investigated her emtpy house along with Letitia Charon, who for some reason said she smelled something in the garden amd started digging. While she did that we examined everything inside and found a diary hidden inside the bed sheets.

To make things easier, I'll just summarize what it said:

Spoiler: After the loss of her daughter in a kidnapping incident, both Joanna's husband, a judge, and herself were shattered. The judge couldn’t continue living and ended up killing himself. After this, Joanna swore to the heavens she would find the culprit.
Using some of his husband’s archives and dedicating herself in body and soul to the investigation of the case, she was able to find the murderer. Nevertheless, when she found him, she didn’t turn him over to the police as she had other plans in mind: While Joanna was searching through the archives she found other people who weren’t convicted for lack of proof, or that just weren’t punishable though their deeds had been actual crimes. For example, letting a woman die on the street, or making a pregnant woman homeless and penniless. She decided to punish them as well, to bring some kind of hope to the people who suffered because of their acts.
She planified the murders with great dedication and knew she was going to die at the end, for she had sinned. But that didn’t matter to her. As she thought of each murder, she found a mansio on top of a mountain. It belonged to Mariano Snider and his wife. Of course, it was the perfect place, so she killed both in their sleep, hid them in her garden and later bought the mansion. She just needed to wait for the weather to worsen itself in order to start the divine judgement.
When we finished reading her diary, we immediately ran outside to see Letitia dragging out two decomposed bodies from under the dirt.

Yes, they were those two. We once again presented this to the police to show their incompetence.

After that, we went back to the mansion to think about the murders... how could Joanna commit them, if no master keys nor secret passages existed?

Well, Bryce had an idea and checked out the grandfather's clock. He found blood there... Jules' blood we later found out.

Because of that, the method became clear: Joanna just messed with the clock's time after killing Jules in order have John be the only one without an alibi.

The following murders aren't too hard. For Emily's murder the two of us just concluded she lied about the locked door and windows, for John's he himself just locked the door before dying and for Mike's she just had to go in and fight.

Finally, Joanna killed herself. How, if the murder weapon was not in the room?
All she needed was an icicle and some heat. She just stabbed herself with it and the fireplace did its job on it.

For Frederick's murder, the police found a dead snake and some dead rats under his bed, so he was likely attacked by it and bitten. The snake then went under the bed to eat the rats, and that's when Christopher found the body.

The last death is Mia's, which Christopher knew the answer to: the brealkast had been poisoned, so she died from just that. He himself almost died too, but miraculously survived.

That is all really. Joanna planned all of that to kill Chris but failed, then Chris tried to take revenge on the angel and failed. My point is: all Christopher did was pointless, he never got the culprit's kid because he had killed her long ago. What a shame.

That is all for today. Tomorrow I will write about that great yearly sausage party happening next week.

Having re read all of that, he looks at the ones around him: everyone is completely fine now, even Paegus recovered from her leg wound long ago.
An exception to that is Kam'rae... who is just like Stephen Hawkwing now, wheelchair and all. The bullet hit the back of her throat and severed her spine, so she cannot move her body. She can only move her head and has a caretaker with her at all times.
Also, something he just remembered, Beau found the cure for Ibniness, a very deadly disease. So that's nice.

---

Game will end in 24 hours. Take this as a post-game talk between the characters.

[Hawkwing425]

(Note to host: fuck you for that pun. And for crippling my character.)

[KingoftheRocks]

(neat)

[Hawkwing425]

“Well, is anyone going to talk?” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out Kam’rae is not happy with her situation.

[Phinerxen]

"Just looking at you, I knew you wouldn't be happy."

[Hawkwing425]

“Eh. I’m still able to steal things. Got any requests?”

[LetitiaWilson]

"You're alive. Be grateful for that.

And if you can, let's see just how good of a thief you are: Go steal Corwin's corpse from whatever pit they put him in. Bastard doesn't deserve a decent burial,"

[Hawkwing425]

“I mean, I could, but... I think his body was incinerated. You’re not gonna find that.”

[Phinerxen]

"Doesn't that leave some ashes?"