Jack blinked at Victoria. "Huh? Weren't you yourself pretty adamant yesterday that we should vote for someone? Suddenly deciding now that Stracion wanting to vote for someone is actually super suspicious doesn't make a lot of sense. Like you agreed yesterday, the town trying their best to vote out someone suspicious if they've got a chance to, and at least trying to put some pressure on and probe people, is just sensible strategy. Why the sudden about-face?"
"I disagree. It is imperative that we get a good lead, I feel; and if the price is a single person being voted out, I believe that we can take the chance. After all, if there's the chance, not an insignificant one, may I add, to immediately put our opponents on the back foot, we should take it. As such, if only to break the tie, I will vote for Phoebe. Don't take it personally; but I have a slightly uneasy feeling about her."
"At this stage of the game, the only thing we go by is gut feel. A few signs stood out to me: looking in dark corners as if avoiding something, the comment about how someone might come along at the last minute and break the tie. And after all, an elimination at this stage of the game gives us an immediate advantage, and a wrong elimination doesn't set us back too much.'
He furrowed his brow. "All in all this kill doesn't make too much sense to me. Like, the logic that the mafia'd finish off someone they didn't manage to get voted off sounds like it makes sense, but it doesn't actually make sense
in the game. The mafia has no reason to be carrying a grudge against some specific townie just because they tried to kill them once. If someone innocent is catching a bunch of suspicion, but they don't get eliminated, they'd actually be pretty much the
last person the mafia would want to shoot, because if that person's still alive the next day, then the mafia can really easily just capitalize on the suspicion that's already on that person and the arguments already being made against them. Even if it
was the mafia themselves building the train, they can just keep arguing the same thing they were already and sound like self-consistent townies, which is easier than trying to divert suspicion onto a whole new person. So shooting that person in the night is just making things harder for themselves. You'd only really want to do that if you think they've got a powerful role, like a cop or something. But there's no way they
knew that here, because this was the first night, so even if they had something like a rolecop, they wouldn't have gotten a result yet. And in some games this could mean someone swapped the targets or something like that, but there's no target-swapping in this game."
He paused, rubbing his forehead. "So I guess there are a few possibilities for why Cygnus died. One is that the mafia thought they'd picked up something in what Cygnus said yesterday that made them
think he might be a cop or something like that. So maybe we can think over what he said yesterday, although I at least didn't pick up anything like that. Another is that whoever's in the mafia just wasn't thinking along those lines at all - like, maybe they haven't played the game that much, or they usually play with different setups or environments where the mafia
do like to kill people who are under suspicion for some reason. Another's that this wasn't the mafia at all, I guess - maybe there's a vigilante who agreed with us, or Stracion herself is the vigilante, and they figured since Cygnus escaped elimination they'd go for them in the night instead, or maybe Cygnus targeted a paranoid gun owner. But then something
else would've needed to have happened to the mafia's kill. Maybe a lucky doctor or a roleblocker? Or they targeted someone bulletproof or a Hider?"
