u/Greenforthou

Ash Aserberry, the Ultimate Writer, is NOT the legal name and title of my main lead. She makes this up moments after waking up due to a baseless idea she arrives at after 1 conversation. However, once the mascot affirms her lie by changing the profile to match what her claim her name and title was. This name is then what’s she’s called for a majority of the story, both due to embarrassment and the sunk-cost fallacy of such a lie. Aspen Mangrove, the Ultimate Editor, is the actual name and title of our lead (which you would learn quickly after she lies, as she can’t internally shut up about anything).

Now as that introduction might imply, Ash is a bit of an impulsive girl. If an idea pops into her head that sounds tempting in anyway and there’s no social pressure to stop her, she will go for it. Which is almost always when you’re isolated from the outside world. And whether it’s actually good or bad for her is always a coin flip.

She has long light brown, nearly platinum looking hair; with a bit of baby hair poking down on her forehead. She’s got amber eyes and a 1000 yard stare into space 70% of the time. She wears a white oversized undershirt and a dark green jacket that has a fluffy hood collar and cuffs. Finally pajama pants that are too bleached out for anyone to notice the massive pattern of cats on it, with some worn out sneakers to keep the long leg cuffs from dragging against the floor. She’s also quite pale, not ghostly looking, but it’s clear sunlight is a choice she says no to most days.

She’s one of the youngest and most emotionally stunted in the cast at the start. So her behavior can become quite erratic as the stress of the situation piles up. She takes great pride in her work, as writing is one of the few things she enjoys doing.

Besides two students she immediately imprints on, she has a distaste or even distain for most of the other students due to their more “independent titles”. As their upon titles inherently place their accomplishments and their own doing, whereas Ash is all too used to fighting tooth and nail to get others to recognize that she’s making whatever piece of writing she gets her hands on good, not the other way around. So being surrounded and stuck with people who have likely never had to struggle with this issue frustrates her. This frustration is only seen internally though, barring a few exceptions. To most of the other students, Ash is just some quiet girl who looks out of it most of the time.

In the death game, she tends to isolate herself from the group. Ash will be cordial if she’s accidentally trips into an interaction, but the moment her patience runs out she will start getting aggressive. She also has the memory of a goldfish for nearly everything and has to keep notes on her tablets writing app to remember literally anything, including most other characters names. Most the cast just elects to ignore her and let her be alone, as the students who try to get her to do anything are either ignored by her, or they get into a fight if they really try to be insistent with her.

But even with all that, her performance in the trial is excellent. As her work as an editor for drama, mystery, and thriller novel/web novels almost always consisted of making sense of the intent of a scene, or point out and pulling connections together for better cohesion. So she’s just about the best in puzzling the order of events or strange oddities at the crime scene.

With Ash, I try to keep a balance of motivations/personality relevant to the setting in an interesting way, but also someone who can be a bit hard to handle with the second-hand embarrassment anyone would get from watching her just do and say the worst things she could, especially at the very start.

Any ideas or thoughts about Ash are appreciated!

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To get the setup out of the way in the prologue and chapter 1 as quickly as possible so you can get to the killing game is a sentiment that makes complete sense, that is why you’re writing the fangan after all. Why wouldn’t you want to get to that over with as soon as possible?

However, I feel the pre-murder period is something that holds a special value you can’t find at any other point in the story. Additional motives aside, this is a period of grace that the cast will never get back once the first body drops, as they know that death is a bluff at that point. Outside of this thinly veiled safety is an opportunity to explore characters at their most casual and normal.

Personally from my own fangan, this period is nearly 10 days long, and I believe none of the time is wasted with the characters just making the most out of what they’re stuck with. And once the first body drops, things start getting worse fast due to the universal agreement that’s been broken.

Near actually getting to these case events in my writing and I want to know what people think, especially since its twist is a bit unorthodox for case 1s. The entire thing’s a bit long because they’re alot of moving parts.

Victim: Cerrel Ujo (Ultimate Therapist). As a senior and the oldest one in the cast, he has a wide range of knowledge regarding the school and how people work, but he usually keeps to himself for his own safety, outside of the occasional snarky comment or his senior friend Oliver. However it is clear he looks down on the others for what he sees as any meaningful accomplishments with their talents.

Killer: Ramos Miller (Ultimate Gardener). A junior who always wants to show he can do more than he’s actually capable of out of an insecurity of his own blatant lack of life experience and general control. Allergic to UV rays (aka the sun). Can get hung up on others when they are dismissive or rude to him, as it always feels really personal to him, regardless of context. 

Time of death: 7:42am

Body discovery time: 7:49am

Body discovery location: Workshop storage room.

Cause of death: Cardiac Arrest from excessive electrical impulses

Other injuries: Fresh bruising on the upper right side of his chest and broken ribs. Multiple deep bruises and fracturing on his face, legs, and arms. Multiple irritated patches of skin on the left side of his chest and his mouth. And while not an injury, his cheeks are covered in crusty dried tears.

The scene of the crime: Cerrel’s body is laid right in front of an extremely heavy chair from the dining hall. The chair has stretchy electrical tape around the chair legs and head, both bounds of tape having been cut right through the front. However the tape around the legs is also heavily stretched. A near dead electronic therapeutic device (ETD for short) from Cerrels room right under a movable table and the stick on pads are also found. String, screw on weights, and thin cardboard box with a box cutter blade inside are also around the room. 

Pre-text to finding the body: Oliver, who typically wakes up an hour before the morning announcement, finds that Cerrel bedroom door is wide open, with his broken tablet right underneath. This spurs him to check all the bedroom doors and try and wake everyone up. However, due to it being in the morning and a good chunk of students still not taking the situation seriously, the search efforts become disjointed and disorganized fast. People are going off alone or getting ready for the day before searching.

Our protagonist, Ash, is the last to willingly get up and search. They’re joined by their friend and two general slackers of the group to search the bedrooms again now that almost everyone’s left them. They find nothing before trying the senior lounge upstairs. Again nothing is up there, but someone in the group tries turning the handle to the long locked workshop, just in case, and it actually opens. The tablet said this room would be opened once someone dies, but none in the group contemplates that as they head inside and lazily check for Cerrel. While inside, Ash starts feeling a massive migraine she attributes to the strong UV lights in this room. Minutes later another student, Skylar, enters the workshop through the door connected to the main building, and not the dorm wing like the group just entered. With a distraught look, she tells the group she found Cerrel and brings them all to the workshop storage room right outside, adjacent to the workshop. There they find Cerrels body and the BDA plays shortly after.

Other events that relate to this case:

Two students, Ramos and Skylar, set up a daily slumber party event in their dorm for any students who feel anxious about sleeping alone. Skylar also sleeps in front of the door so no one can get out without informing her first.

A self imposed curfew is in place at night time for every student, with one student volunteering to check that all doors are locked an hour later to make sure they’re all in their rooms (since they can only be locked from the inside, ergo, someone has to be inside). Whoever volunteers to check the doors is also informed of who goes to the sleepover to avoid confusion. The student to last check everyone’s room was also at the sleepover that night, and they say everyone’s room was locked that night (minus those from the sleepover), including Cerrels.

A few days prior, a student got the mascot, Maligien, to set up a rule for Ramos and Ash, due to their constant physical altercations with each other: If they ever get within 10 feet of each other, they will both be punished through Maligien strange ability to just make them feel pain at seemingly any time. Ramos has already experienced this punishment days earlier, Ash has not. Neither of them have broken this rule yet.

The tablets each student has have a map function that shows the entire school, along with seemingly showing you where the tablet is located with a little red star icon. Most students see this map as meaningless since they’re already familiar with the school.

Two days prior, Cerrels tablet was stolen from his bedroom while or after he got wasted with some other students and had to stay in another students room because he couldn’t be made to lock his own while intoxicated.

**The twist:**
So the big thing about this case is that this was a set-up, the culprit who wanted to kill Cerrel and his actual killer in Ramos are two separate people. At the end of the trial the group figures out who Cerrels killer is, but not his actual culprit/kidnapper. Cerrel was kidnapped right before nighttime of the previous day. He was tied up and had the ETD put all around his heart. It was left on all night, albeit at a low level, to disrupt his heart’s system and make it unstable. All this to set up to where anyone who entered the room would step on a pressure plate that would immediately switch the ETD to max power, which could and did send him into cardiac arrest, killing him. And the person who happened to trigger it was Ramos the following morning during the search. 

How it happened:

The culprit took Cerrels tablet days beforehand to track them because, as it turns out, the star in the map section actually tracks the corresponding students location, not their tablets. So stealing their tablet is a good way at finding a time when they’re alone. They knock Cerrel out, specifically with a taken apart wheel leg of a spinning chair from the computer room, as he was heading from the library on the 2nd floor down to the dorms on the 1st. He was then dragged into the workshop storage room, likely due to it being the closest single entrance room near the two. This was done at most after 7:50pm yesterday and before 10:30pm.

Afterwards, they grabbed everything needed for this set-up to work, either from their respective rooms, or already grabbed in advance to avoid detection. They also somehow manage to both lock and unlock their own door and Cerrels without being inside the room. The group suspects more screwable weights and string could’ve been used to close it, but they have no way of testing it during the trial. 

No one noticed most of these things missing or anything strange happening until it was too late to verify, so no one besides the culprit can truly know the order of events. The exception is the dining hall chair, as one of the strongest students cleans the dining hall every day at around 9:30pm, which includes the chairs, and he confirms they were all there before he left. These chairs are incredibly heavy as well, leaving marks on all floors beside the dining hall. And there were no new marks on the ground. So either had a tool to move the chair without leaving marks, or they were strong enough to just carry it. Then they tape Cerrel to the chair and brutally beat them in multiple areas, either out of rage or to make them too weak to resist when they eventually wake up. He was certainly awake during or after this though, with the dried tears covering his face.

Now the chair is important because everyone at sleepover was already there when they were moving said chair. And this is important because a prime conclusion running the group’s logic during the actual trial is that the person who kidnapped Cerrel must’ve been the one to kill him, because why would someone want to kill another student and not try to escape. This idea immediately eliminates Ramos from the suspect pool after they discover Cerrel was kidnapped during the time Ramos was in his room for the sleepover. And when this assumption is later challenged it’s faced with backlash from those at the sleepover who do not want to be suspected at all.

Back to the culprit though, they set everything up with Cerrel so anyone who steps on the weighted cardboard pressure plate would cut the string holding the screwable weight ready to set the ETD to max fall. After they turn the device on, they then leave Cerrel there overnight. Before they return to their room, they somehow open Cerrels door and leave his tablet right next to it, now shattered since its purpose is done. 

The next morning goes how everyone remembers it, Oliver got everyone up and people began searching. Skylar and Ramos had both decided to search the computer room and board game room on the 2nd floor together. Once they found nothing, they agreed to split up: Skylar would search the spare rooms and classrooms on the left, Ramos would search the workshop storage room and classrooms on the right. The moment Ramos opened the door and noticed Cerrel right ahead, possibly even still awake and trying to move, his fate was sealed. He didn’t even notice the pressure plate right next to the door as he ran up to Cerrel. 

In those following moments, while his killer was using his gardening clippers to free his torso from the tape, Cerrel went into cardiac arrest. It didn’t take long for Ramos to notice he wasn’t breathing. In a panic Ramos immediately sets Cerrel on his back and begins performing hand-to-heart cpr. However he does it on the wrong side, either not realizing out of panic, or just forgetting which sides the hearts on. The bruising and fracturing on his ribs is a common occurrence for when this type of cpr is done. He also begins yelling for help, but not only was there nobody nearby, the sound resistant flooring in the main building would’ve likely kept his words away from anyone who was.

This type of cpr is also extremely exhausting to keep up, so it didn’t take long for Ramos arms to give out. And once that happens, Ramos knows there’s no saving Cerrel. And that’s when he notices the trap used to kill Cerrel. The ETD, the tiny wires going under his shirt, the pressure plate. He realizes he’d been set up to kill Cerrel, and if the rules were true, he’d be killed. And all because he was trying to prove he was valuable. 

Ramos immediately flees the scene upon realizing this, not even grabbing his clippers before he’s already out the door. Ramos had 3 directions to run in: Either toward the stairs and to the 1st or 3rd floor, toward where Skylar was searching, or at the end of the hallway, where he agreed to search for Cerrel just minutes earlier. He decides to head to the end of the hallway to “search” and just wait out the inevitable discovery of Cerrel. However, another student had already begun searching those classrooms, and was just exiting one of them as Ramos approached. In a split second decision to avoid being seen, Ramos picked the secret 4th option to run in: a locked door right out of view, the door to the workshop. Fortunately for him, Cerrel’s death meant the workshop door was now unlocked. So he quickly heads inside. 

With the other door leading to the senior lounge, he could be back in his room before anyone found the body. However, he noticed through that doors sidelight that Ash and her group were right outside looking around. With little other option, he hides himself in a cupboard in the workshop and as the group enters, prays that they won’t look where he’s at. While the group shoddily searches the workshop, Ash unknowingly gets within 10 feet of Ramos, and the two get punished for it. However, since Ash hasn’t experienced the punishment before, she mistakes the pain she’s feeling for a very bad migraine. 

Now if we rewind a bit, as Ramos was in the hallway, scrambling toward the workshop, someone actually noticed him as he entered: Skylar. She had just finished searching the spare rooms and was about to move onto her side of the classrooms when she noticed him across the intersection hallway in an absolute panic. She initially was going to enter the workshop right away to chase after him, but then she noticed the workshop storage rooms door wide open. She finds the scene exactly how Ramos left it. But even with the body still warm, she doesn’t believe Ramos to be the culprit, and takes efforts to remove his presence from the scene in the clipper and her later testimony about his whereabouts. She also cuts the tape off Cerrels leg so he can be laid down properly, as the tape was keeping them in a weird position. With this, she heads to the workshop to find Ramos, only to be greeted with 4 other people already searching the room, with no Ramos in sight. She tells the group of the body and they leave.

When Ramos is alone again, he quickly gets out of his hiding spot and leaves through the other door, but not before getting hit with powerful UV lights, which will later reveal themselves as serious hives later during the trial. He returns to his room, with only a few moments of rest before the BDA announcement plays and he has to return to where he just ran from. It’s also here he notices he doesn’t have his clippers on him, so he grabs an extra pair and readies a cover story for why his clippers are at the scene of the crime as he rushes over there.

But one last hiccup happens: the sole student who refused to search and stay in their room is now leaving to the BDA said to go. And now Ramos has to wait until they leave the dorm wing so they don’t know he’s there. Which means Ramos gets to the scene of the crime noticeably later compared to the time he should’ve arrived when comparing where he allegedly was. All this trouble for Ramos while the true culprit of the crime gets away without notice, truly a tragedy.

That was alot, and I even left out some additional information that would’ve been used to point at other potential suspects. But if you have any questions I’d be glad to answer them for the feedback!