Rumor (6)

As the meaning of the video and her statement settled in, the majority of the students in the auditorium began to feel uneasy. The students who had actively participated in either framing Aria or sent her death threats and other verbal abuse began to shuffle through the crowd, hoping to escape while everyone was distracted.

To their dismay, when they reached the doors, they were unable to open them. Over the next several moments, a small group had formed by the doors trying to open them.

Their actions had initially been planned to allow them to escape from the room unnoticed but now the guilty parties had isolated themselves and made their participation obvious.

With everyone staring at them they all quickly made their way back into the crowd but no matter how fast they got back to their spot, they still received knowing looks from everyone around them.

When everyone settled down again, Aika cleared her throat to bring their attention back to herself and continued.

"For the accusations of sugar babies, my family's security looked into the men from each photo and not only did they find that they were all from wealthy families, they discovered proof that every picture except those at the Monocled Rabbit were edited to place Aria Song in them."

After she finished speaking, the screen switched to show side by side comparisons of Aria and the woman in each photo. In more than half of the fake ones, the woman was very clearly not her and just had her face edited.

As each photo comparison cycled through even the people who were initially fully worked up on the idea of justice and the wealthy and powerful against those weaker than them had to admit that the photos were clearly fake.

With the pictures with everyone except for Devin already disproved, everyone had already figured out that the rest of this would just be an execution. Certain members of the crowd even started recording Sarah's face so that they would have a recording of the moment her confidence and false justice crumbled.

Seeing the evidence the other side presented, Sarah started to feel a cold sweat and bit her lips until they started bleeding. She was so certain that the devil would finally be revealed today and now everything was going wrong.

To her what was happening didn't make any sense, even though she knew the evidence she had was all fake, she was so convinced that Aria was guilty that she couldn't believe people would ever think otherwise.

Unable to contain herself, she shouted at the crowd frantically, her hair becoming wild and her collected appearance transforming to that of an angry shrew.

"HOW CAN YOU BELIEVE HER LIES! ARIA IS EVIL! SHE DESERVES TO BE PUNISHED!"

After screaming, she charged at Aria in an attempt to push her off the stage but was grabbed and held back by two teachers.

Her shouting continued until she was too far away for people to hear anymore. Only a moment after it became quiet, Aika clicked onto the next piece of her evidence without a word.

This time, it was a video from Monocled Rabbit's security cameras. The footage slowly cycled through each time there was a photo taken and showed the conversations that had been ignored in the pictures.

In every seemingly inappropriate image, it would be Devin asking what order she wanted because her being seen with more waiters was the last thing either of their images needed. As it went on, the only exceptions to this became obvious.

Whenever it was a picture showing them hugging or crying, it would be because of something related to her either being bullied or saying she didn't understand why people didn't want her as a roommate and her comforting her as a father figure.

By the time all of the videos had been shown, the entire crowd felt like they had been slapped in their faces repeatedly. The quicker tempered students even started posting anger filled messages on all of Sarah's social media pages, calling her a liar and saying she tried to frame an innocent student.

Even worse were the teachers faces. Many of them had come in without being told about the situation and were experiencing the same feelings of shock and anger as the crowd but many times worse as they were supposed to look into things like these as calm collected adults and not take it at face value.

Of everyone in the room, the only ones who didn't look terrible were Aika, Aria, and the Dean who had been told what happened beforehand and shown the evidence they had managed to gather.

"The last thing I would like to show everyone is this evidence tracking the threat that Sarah claimed to have received from Aria. As you can see, it clearly shows that the text message came from a phone registered to a young girl named Nora Woods who lives nearly 1000 miles away and hasn't had any contact with Aria for a long time."