...DawningWinds, you agreed with my suggestion to not reveal who you switched on night 0 a few posts back, and then you suddenly changed your mind and revealed it anyway, without explaining why the change of heart. What's up with that? I don't suspect you, because I'm pretty damn sure you're mechanically confirmed innocent now as I'm about to lengthily go into, but... ????
Before I lengthily go into that, though, let me just clarify why I think it's very unlikely for the mafia to waste their most powerful weapon so early in a situation like this. Yes, Chibi Pika is a skilled player, but there was no proof that Chibi had a particularly powerful night action, nor that anyone else thought Chibi was so powerful that they'd almost certainly want to protect him. Ntairow's reasons for protecting Chibi last night were in-character reasons, not because Chibi Pika is a skilled player, so it was essentially chance. It seems very unreasonable to me that the mafia would want to waste such a powerful one-off power on that when they had no reason to believe they would need to.
If the mafia was so scared of Chibi Pika and so determined to kill them just because they're a skilled player, never mind Chibi's role power, then I feel like that'd probably be something they would have tried to do in the first place, on night 0. If they'd done that, and failed, then maybe I can see them still being so determined to remove this particular player from the game that they tried again with the strongman kill last night, to pierce whatever had stopped them before. But that'll only hold water if anyone speaks up to explain how Chibi could have survived being the night 0 target, since we know that one wasn't Ntairow.
Admittedly, this one's all just my judgement of what I think the mafia would do and not actual proof, but I think it's really, really unlikely, and we almost certainly still have the strongman kill to worry about.
Anyway, that aside, I have been doing some serious Logicking to try and confirm to myself that, yes, Finnar, Lauchs, and Ntairow (I'll be using the character names for this) are basically all confirmed innocent by this turn of events, except for if some very, very unlikely edge cases are happening.
...Well, actually, I don't think Ntairow's claim is mechanically confirmed by anything in particular. But the way she built up to that roleclaim across three posts, including the initial lack of clarity thanks to bewilderment over seeing her protection target dead, strikes me as very genuine and difficult to fake. So even though I don't believe there's any explicit proof of her claim right now, I really don't think she's lying. That and I can't even think of any reason to lie about that particular claim, and when I try to think her having done so, the hypotheticals I'm about to go into get even more complicated and I can't quite untangle it. If anyone else can come up with a potential reason for Ntairow's claim to be fake and wants to do the mental gymnastics over that, be my guest.
(I won't be RPing this, because it's difficult enough to get my own words around it, and because Tefiren isn't the type to give long explanations like this. But if anyone wants to pretend he made basically these points in some form or other so they can respond to it in-RP, go ahead.)
So! The possible scenarios that I can think of:
Scenario 1: Everyone involved is innocent and telling the truth, and the mafia targeted Lauchs.
Ntairow protected Chibi. The mafia shot at Lauchs. Finnar switched the targets so that Lauchs was protected and Chibi died instead. This means Lauchs is innocent as well, because the mafia wouldn't shoot themselves while not expecting it to be redirected.
This is by far the most likely scenario.
Scenario 2: Finnar is lying; she is actually mafia. No switching happened at all last night, and the strongman kill is what pierced the protection on Chibi.
My personal thoughts on how unlikely it'd be for the mafia to use up their strongman kill here aside, there would only be two possible motives for a hypothetical mafia-Finnar to lie here.
One would be to explain why Chibi died with a reason that wasn't the strongman kill, to make us think they still have it when they don't. However, I doubt this, since Finnar claimed before Ntairow had even directly spoken up about protecting Chibi. Until then, none of us even knew that Chibi's death was an apparent impossibility, unless they were very good at reading between the lines of Ntairow's vague softclaiming.
The second reason why a hypothetical mafia-Finnar would lie about swapping Lauchs and Chibi, which would apply before they even knew Chibi was definitely protected, is that this was a gambit to make Lauchs appear to be confirmed innocent. Which would mean that Lauchs is also mafia along with Finnar. That seems a very risky gambit, though, because if it fell through and one of them was found guilty at any point, we'd then basically know that the other has to be, as well. (Also, I have my own reason for being almost completely sure this is not the case, but I'd rather keep quiet about precisely what it is, at least for today. It's not that important, not when I think this is pretty damn unlikely regardless.)
---Scenario 2b: Finnar is lying and actually mafia; someone else who hasn't spoken up yet coincidentally switched Chibi with the mafia's actual target last night, and therefore only a regular kill was needed to kill Chibi. But this would give the exact same reasons for Finnar to be lying as the regular Scenario 2.
Scenario 3: Finnar is telling the truth about having swapped those two last night, but she is a mafia bus driver, and the mafia killer targeted Lauchs knowing it would hit Chibi instead.
The reasons for the mafia to do something so convoluted would be a similar thing of wanting to pierce through potential protection on Chibi, this time without using up the strongman kill. But this again carries the same issue of why they would even be so sure Chibi was going to be protected in the first place. And this would also cause a game balance issue - if the mafia had a bus driver and could pierce protection this way, they wouldn't even need the strongman for anything except bulletproofs and a possible town roleblocker.
This scenario could also still be for the bonus purpose of clearing a hypothetical mafia-Lauchs, in that the mafia actually shot at themselves while knowing it would land on someone else. But they could just as well have used Lauchs as a springboard for this even if he's innocent; it's not like they'd need to use one of their own for it.
I guess Scenario 4 would be that a strongman kill was aimed at Chibi even though Finnar did do the switch, and strongman kills also pierce switching. But I really don't think they do. The whole point of a Hider role being the only thing to block strongmen is that the target isn't even there where they should be, meaning nobody dies. And in the case of bus drivers, the intended target isn't where they should be, but a different person is there instead, so it follows that that other person should get killed.
So, yeah. I realise this doesn't get us any actual suspected mafia, but at least it narrows down the pool of potentials a bit.
(Also, if anyone innocent happened to roleblock Ntairow such that it'd actually be perfectly possible to kill Chibi with a regular kill targeted at him, or if they roleblocked Finnar, either of which would change some of the logic here, please speak the hell up.)
