Identity Revealed

I'll do it by myself

The months building up to the World Exhibition were anything but ordinary. Architect Norah Barnlow who had been granted such a wondrous opportunity to plan the creation of the building that the event would be held in by Mayor Castletown: only to wind up dead beneath a pile of glass and metal.

This death didn't strike anyone as odd upon the reveal of the killer, and the papers simply painted her as a woeful soul, that losing her father drove her to such a crime. It didn't take anyone by surprise either that such a woman like Norah had been murdered. You could tell simply by the way people spoke about her that she wasn't well liked. She'd been rather cruel in both actions as well as her words, and many people seemed to pray for her downfall.

But again, this didn't strike anyone as suspicious. It was only when finalist Orville West had been found in a crumpled heap after being so ruthlessly taken out of the sky by a Luddite without even so much as an ounce of remorse. This wouldn't have even sounded weird either, not until word got out that Orville very much could have died regardless of if Abe had hunted him like a bird. It had come to light shortly after his demise that his jetpack had been tampered with. Now this would usually immediately ring alarm bells in people's heads, especially the heads of police officers.. at least that's what Celine Georges had hoped.

She had watched and waited from the sidelines, hoping that someone would take notice of the situation at hand and would act accordingly. However, waiting for someone to finally act seemed to be taking absolutely forever, far too much time that Celine didn't even really have to spare. She was so incredibly busy finalising and making sure her beloved invention was good to go for when she was to present the Chessmaton to the judges. They would surely see her for her incredible talent, see her as a truly worthy winner.

But this didn’t even matter once everything came to a shrieking stop once Celine had spotted several errors in the machine's programming. It no longer seemed to follow even the simplest of commands, and any chess piece she tried to slot into its metallic grip did it immediately launch straight at the wall, narrowly missing the French woman's head.

It was all too strange, she'd checked over the Chessmaton not just once, but a few times; her fingers delicately brushed over the cogs as well as the wiring inside. It didn't immediately click inside her brain, but something felt truly wrong… Celine had an uneasy feeling brewing within her. Granted, some cogs were in strange conditions, not at all like how she'd left them when packing away the machine for the night.. It was only when she looked closer, eyes running along the wires in order to inspect them did she suddenly gasp, palms slamming against the worktop. One wire had been cut. Not torn like some people assumed once she had told them.. It had been cut. Outsiders may assume Celine had just been careless with her creation, accidentally tearing up the wire without noticing. But Celine knew herself.. she handled her machinery like a mother would handle her young.. with extreme caution as to not accidentally break something.

Celine had grabbed the recent newspaper along with her journal she'd been gifted by her father back home in France. She scoured the article on Orville's death until she found the section all about the supposed tampering with his creation. It didn't have much as it was only speculating: but Charles Dupont, a friend of her cousin who'd spoken a few words about it in the article seemed pretty adamant about it being down to sabotage rather than Orville or the killer.

The article was soon stuck to a page of her diary, and she then moved on to annotate, drawing lines off of certain words that she had circled before giving her thoughts on the matter. The competition meant everything to her, so she managed quite a few words until the sound of the clock on her wall startled her into dropping her pen onto the table. She'd come back to this later, as a nagging feeling inside told her this would only get progressively worse as time went on.