Jack flipped through more pages of his notebook, eyes straining. "Allll right, here's what I've got on Rui."
She took another bite and spoke around a mouthful of brownie. “I mean, to jump the gun without information feels like we’re more likely to shoot ourselves in the foot than not, right? So not eliminating is probably for the b—”
She’d barely gotten the words out when suddenly votes started flying around. Wait, what? Frankly, she was still wrapping her head around the Chinchou kid who said he was a Pokemorph (???) and she’d at least been hoping to get everybody’s name and maybe enjoy some more small talk first, but, well…maybe not.
“Wow, some of you are really going for it, huh?” She polished off the rest of the brownie before grabbing another. “Hmm. Well, I don’t want to eliminate anybody yet, but votes can be a good source of information, too. So, I’ll vote for…um, Phoebe! That was your name, right?” She threw a smile to the bubbly ghost girl. “Sorry. Please don’t take that the wrong way. Love your hair, by the way.”
Vote: Phoebe
"Originally she was on my radar because of the way her vote on Phoebe played out on day one. First, she places this pressure vote, but it comes with an 'I don't want to eliminate anybody yet' and no questioning or anything, so it doesn't really have any teeth as a pressure vote..."
“If we had more information to go off of, I might agree with you. But since we don’t, I’m against the idea of eliminating anybody today, you know?”
She gave Phoebe an apologetic look. “Sorry again. But hey, if nothing changes before our day is up, I’ll make sure to change my vote!” Maybe Phoebe was a bad guy and maybe she wasn’t, but it just didn’t feel fair to boot her out at complete random. And, come on, they had just started to become friends. Maybe Rui selfishly wanted more time to hang out with her—was that so bad? The point of games was to have fun, after all.
"And then next post, after getting another vote on Phoebe, she immediately explicitly said she was going to change her vote, but didn't actually change it - just kind of let it hang there. Still wondering what was up with that."
Phoebe had pointed a vote right back at Victoria with a smile. Which was fair enough, since Rui had been considering voting for her if nobody else did; pushing for an elimination this early had her raising a metaphorical eyebrow, but she wasn’t about to give her the boot over it—not so early in the game, anyway.
Rui shot her hand up in the air, even rising to her tiptoes for good measure. “Well, I’m officially changing my vote! I’m going neutral!”
"Then she says she was considering voting for Victoria, even though she'd only ever said she wanted no-elimination that day. All in all I didn't like that progression, and thought it seemed like she was trying to quickly distance from Victoria. But then Victoria flipped town, so that was definitely not it at least for that bit. Rest feels kind of iffy now, but would like to hear why she let the vote sit."
[[So…yeah. Y’all have no idea the sheer DREAD I felt when I returned to the thread and realized I’d missed the deadline and—I kid you not—TEN PAGES OF BACKLOG. Irl has frankly been a massive poo storm lately, and Sunday was especially busy, so by the time I remembered to check the thread, the day had closed and I’d missed everything. 🫠
"I do think she seems sincere about just missing most of day two. It didn't seem like a suspiciously timed absence, not like she disappeared when anything in particular was going down, and IRL can be like that. So I'll believe her on that one."
Rui furrowed her brow in thought and clasped her hands behind her back. “You know, I was having the same train of thought. But I guess we were both wrong if Phoebe’s claim is true!” She gave the other girl a grin. “I’m kind of torn. On one hand, I think Phoebe is telling the truth that she has a night power, even one that can take out other players. But I don’t know if I believe she’s a vigilante. In fact, I’m starting to wonder if she’s actually a third party—a serial killer, even?
“Think about it. If town really has four doctors (five, if Victoria was telling the truth, and even six, if Stracion is, too), then would they really need a vigilante? I mean, a vigilante could still shoot a fellow town member, true, but once the doctors started revealing themselves and working together, then town would be crazy powerful. I feel like it’s more likely that you’re a third party trying to blend in with town.”
"Mmmm. This does kind of make sense to me, with respect to town power - if the only killing apart from the mafia's one were town-controlled,
and there's so many doctors around, that seems pretty odd? Although the mafia might have roleblocking and strongman or something."
Oh, and my reason for only placing Chibi as soft town and for why I’m leaning sus for Free: both of them have conveniently claimed doctor, and Pano makes a good point about the possibility of a scum doc. This is why Chibi isn’t totally in the clear for me—their reaction definitely cements them as doc imo, but that doesn’t mean they are town. As for Free, I’m waffling SO much because I don’t think I believe her doc claim, BUT she seems towny to me, aghhhh. screw it I’m throwing Free into neutral sus jail and leaving her there to think about her sins. 😂 I do wanna hear more from her and Chibi though.]]
"I'm not sure about the idea of mafia doctor reacting with surprise at the idea of someone claiming town doctor, honestly? Why would they? Unless I guess they were trying to feign surprise for the purposes of a fakeclaim?"
[[to be fair, that was only a mild reason for me side-eying you! I agree that Chibi shouldn’t be automatically trusted as town for their claim—technically nobody should be, though I think Fox and Tetra have pretty much cemented their standing. I mean, I guess one of them could be a mafia doctor, and just tweaked their role PM a little, but that still would have been REAL heckin risky and I don’t think either of them would have taken that chance if they were scum.
"I don't think they could've easily just tweaked it because they'd need to like, have the exact same wording for the town win condition, right...? I feel like the only way it can be them
is if the mafia got fake PMs. Or at least a fake version of the town win condition? Maybe that's more likely?"
Pano is stressing me out lol. (Ily Pano.) Her defensiveness and aggressive pushing here reminds me a lot of when she was SK (or scum? Idr) a while back and the way she responded when placed under suspicion. But then again, maybe this is the way she always behaves when under scrutiny? She usually dies in the night instead lol. Which. LUCKY. Dying in the night is WAY less stressful than getting voted out in the day, LOL.
"Hmmm... It does kind of remind me of that too, yeah."
Honestly though, it comes down to tomatorade or Pano for me. I’m not familiar with Tomatorade’s style, so I have no idea what to make of it, but it does seem very shifty and smoke-blowy and it’s setting off all kinds of alarms in my head. But maybe that’s just how they play?? Idk??? It’s still SUS AF though, especially since I don’t really buy that there’s a town aligned PGO in this setup. Idk. Is PGO normally a town role? Or can it be anything?
"PGO's
more often town, apparently. But like I mentioned earlier, not sure about this setup."
He shook his head. "Okay, I found myself doing a lot of just responding to stuff she said because there wasn't all that much there that really struck me much. The stuff that made me suspect her on day one didn't really continue. I don't know. I'm not sure about her, but I felt worse about Isaac reading back through his stuff, and I'm still not sure town PGO actually makes all that much sense in this setup, and my brain is melting, so I guess I'll go
Isaac and be done with it."
