Kasimir

You say this but don't tag them, tsk I'm indifferent either way: feels like the main ? is Striker but he's mentioned it's a weeks issue here. Araris has exams. El's in Ireland. Maybe try asking friends/old-timers?

Might have forgotten I asked, at least

I think #2 opens pretty much the "can we pay you to donate organs" bioethics/medical ethics can of worms, since I presume this still involves the loss of part of your spiritweb. This generally manifests in a debate about the extent to which this inherently penalises the worse off in society or even promotes a form of 'exploitation tourism', and the extent to which this is simply a regulatory problem and we could in principle have completely ethical donations. (Put it this way: if you're living below the poverty line, and you're consenting to this process for the cash compensation, is this really informed consent in the full way we mean this? I think there's a decent argument for the fact that there's just something fundamentally ethically troubling about considering this an acceptable transaction when it's clear the donor's choices were pretty limited. Edited to add: I suppose maybe the analogy is - we don't accept market forces as an excuse for factories with poor safety conditions. We do seem to believe there is some kind of ethical duty to minimise the harm to the worker. You can sort of do that here, but you're arguably paying the donor to accept a certain level of harm that is irreducible. Is that ever ethical? Well, I would argue one of the better ways to look at ethics is to ask if we'd accept that in analogous cases. The analogy with paid organ donation here is pretty compelling IMO.) It's actually possible that not just metalborn but that they might make this compulsory for all who are dying and then just say, "You can opt out, and if you do, you won't be prioritised for any services that require the use of medallions." But this is again running off existing organ donation policy parallels.

@DrakeMarshall: #5 green all around me for now the village still stands vote, then, and be damned

Found out someone I knew from early uni days is dead now, and had done some pretty bad things. I don't know how to feel.

Do you control how much you purchase? I allow myself some cheat inks, but generally have a one in-one out rule.

Writer's Blood reminds me of a better lubricated Oxblood or the Monteverde Burgundy. Great colour. But I feel you about inks and needing to destash/finish them.

Not to be a wet blanket to anyone who wants to sign up but I think it's worth people considering if you actually have the time or attention span to commit. If you're having misgivings but sign up just to make numbers and then can't be active and inactive out, then it's just slapping a bandage on the wound. Ash is still effectively running a fifteen player game - it's just disguised by the appearance of having made the numeric limit, and then the inactivity is going to be seriously damaging since the game presumes twenty active players minimum for balance.

I think the issue here is: consider PtV. Yes, the Elims win at parity, but suppose we are looking at a 2-Elim game. A perfect game for the Village is to take down 2 Elims. Suppose JNV is scanned C1. No one bothered asking if they should scan Devo - they just LAFOed. The stamp can only do so much, same with Mat's Confirmed Villager role. And a player who wants to be scanned instead of being killed raises red flags, so you're very much at the Village's mercy to not be dominoed either way. So perfect game for Village: win in 2-3 cycles. For the Elim team, they win in minimum 5 cycles. That's pretty disproportionate, ignoring the fact that the PtV gets pretty steep if you're a solo Elim because you need that final three to be able to turn on each other (TJ's problem.) There's no point gambling an Elim won't be scanned. The Village just has a numerical advantage there, and doing what JNV did - RPing without engagement and fairly transactional PMs - will get you scanned, so trying to protect themselves from scanning automatically puts them in the suspect pool. A perfect game for a 3 Elim team is 3-4 cycles for the Village, 4 for the Elims. That's far more balanced, difficulty-wise, and it recognises that the Village will probably get off at least one scan on an Elim because of scan pool exposure. Fair, that was the point of a high threshold and non-refunded bids, yes. I think that's why Drake and I were hesitating over how to index it next to a Seeker. It's easier for the Elims to make a kill guess, but arguably once the player has burned the Seek, then you gotta ask whether they are still an immediate kill necessity. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Agreed about avoiding the inactive or mayor Seeker problem, though, which is one attraction of moving the Seek around. The other aspect I think is that it might average out better: you probably have players who make very good Seek choices and players who make very bad ones, but due to the distributed nature of this Seek, it gets functionally aggregated out. But the main aspect I think I didn't consider enough: what happens in a lone Elim final few scenario and the ancillary issue that this effectively models a V!Seeker who never gets killed.

No, but I've been interpreting my rules according to the intent in order to allow the IC style Archer used. I'm about increasing RP. The cosmetic roles give players a simple way to do it, but I generally do not care too hard as long as you're clearly sort of in your role. And you were, enough for me.

Two, sir. You bid two SP

The correct attitude to LG95 is to go method acting! Who needs rules anyway just have fun.

It's a QF...it's in the title

This needle drop probably shouldn't work but it really, really does. The strings overwhelming the chorus and Bowie's and Mercury's vocals makes it more tragic/sad than the original.

Any possibility you can say a bit more in spoilers? I'm curious as I've been tempted to get Survivor, but:

After-Action Report Inactives I flag this first because Araris and I had a conversation about this, and Araris wanted this brought up. At the start of the game, when I did the rands, Hoid was Evil in nine out of ten rands, to the point I wondered if my Python script needed an exorcist. There were two main rands in contention that Araris and I were considering: A) Devo/Hoid/TJ, and B ) TKN/JNV/Wiz. Team B was risky - they'd be a low to middling activity team in a game where Seeking was activity-driven. This had its advantages but could also be innately problematic for the Elims. Team A...I just didn't like having Devo be a staple Elim. I had similar reasons for discarding the E!Archer and E!Fifth rands, but at the same time, the reason why the Devo/Hoid/TJ distro was in consideration is it gave Hoid two stable teammates for support. Araris was of the view this was a good introduction for a new player to SE. I didn't disagree, since my LG5 had basically been that way, via Awes and Alv. Problem was, Hoid had not signed into the Shard for three days by the time the game was about to start. I consulted Araris and in the end, we made the swap from Hoid to JNV, feeling that it would probably be worse if we allowed the Hoid distro, Hoid really went inactive, and then we had Aman replace Hoid, which would play merry hell with balance. Is there a good answer to this? Not particularly. Inactives always mess with a game. I've said this enough times. The point Araris wanted brought up for discussion is whether a GM should have the right, subject to IM approval, to eject an inactive from the game prior to kick-off. The main red flag here would be prolonged inactivity and the lack of a response prior to the game starting. (Note that I sent Hoid a check-in PM before the game started, but sort of wish I'd done so earlier and could see that being part of the checks if a GM wishes to utilise this expulsion option.) Balance I want to address this separate from the mechanics, largely because I think this is a separate discussion, and also because Drake and I had been talking about making a simulation of this ruleset. Do I think this was balanced? Ehhhhh. First thing to mention is the history of the anon voting + PMs format. As I mentioned, there have been three iterations of this ruleset, with some small differences: QF1, QF11, QF43. The Village has lost all of them. This is the first Village win. But in all fairness, this is not a faithful rerun, due to the fact you can't shut down PMs (but PMs weren't always shut down) and the fact the Village Seeker has become the signet bid. I think there's something to be said for trying to avoid expectations too much. In a set-up with a Seek and PMs and anon voting, arguably I should have run a rand with a thread controller and a PM spider (preferably packaged in the same player.) Realistically this was bringing me back to either E!Archer or E!Fifth rands. But there's also something to be said, IMO, for how a lot of the domino-sweep that tumbled out from this game is directly attributable to a single decision point here: the Elim decision to go low info kill C1. Archer himself expressed surprise he wasn't killed, and in the world Archer gets killed, JNV doesn't get scanned, and Devo and TJ aren't exposed trying to save JNV because of what happens C2. I think I had quite a bit to say about Elim credulity in the dead doc, but I also think that if a player is blatantly networking or shenaniganing in PMs and you know points = Seek and your team goes for a player with a low points count, you are setting yourself up for trouble in the next round. I don't know about how much I want to attribute this to a balance issue but I think this has to be confronted. I think I would say this: if you are a GM running a small game with a Seek, it's better to give the Elims thread control / PM sight. It's too easy to get blindsided otherwise. It's unfortunate that's predictable, but predictability should always come second to a game that is more robustly balanced. (I will note there is a side issue here where players should maybe not feed this by refusing to meta-game the GM's psychology.) I will also note that the small size of this game did add to volatility. I think this would be true even if I just ran a complete QF1 set-up. PMs + Anon Voting I don't really disagree that Archer used that to brutal effect this game. I also am not sure about the extent to which I'd assent to the claim this is inherently Village-leaning. I've been on both sides of the anon voting end (I'll agree not the PM end) and the reason I was so ambivalent about it in LG94 boils down to a few things: anon voting let me lie about the timing of my Striker bus vote as an Elim, which most players simply bought. Not being able to do preference analysis because you only know final votes can be painful for the Village. That's less information you have, especially if you aren't a post reader. The flip side of that coin is that as a Villager, you can blindside the Elims with an anon vote out of nowhere, or leave ambiguity about the final trains. This is what happened in LG94, with my sudden VitC onto Mat, and in QF59, where we just hesitated about whether or not to bus Striker because we had no good sense of train volumes. And E!me used anon voting to just sort of murder Ash so. But largely I'm more sceptical: I also feel you do sacrifice the ability to place pressure on players in a significant way, which is again, a Village tool. In a world where Archer was wrong (suppose the Elims stamped JNV, even), that's two cycles wasted to lack of sharp discussion and players just voting whatever. I think that's a different kind of objection from E!TJ's accountability: it's not about accountability but the whole point of an exe - apply pressure, get reactions, do preference analysis, watch how players shift in response to the developing exe and trains. If this information isn't there, it's not an exe anymore, just a glorified vig kill. I'd say more that the way this turned out was a high risk/high reward kind of situation. I'm not a fan of gutting the Village exe discussion. ...I have at least been consistent about this FWIW I don't agree with Young!Kas about abstaining from exeing even in a LG, but I think the point about the point of a discussed lynch is what I'm driving at here. I think the Seek did make up for it in this game, which is maybe why I am not sure about having a bidding Seek mechanic go alongside PMs and anon voting. I don't think the three work together as well. Fundamentally, I suppose this sounds like the wishy-washy cop-out I accused Aman of giving in LG94 but I don't feel there's a straightforward assessment. I do feel players kneejerk into reading these mech as more E than they should be, but I also think that players downplay how much they can cost the Village at their peril. Rotating Seek I wanted to see if we could make a Seek that wasn't tied to a single player. Part of this is to let other players in on the fun of Seeking. The downside is that this more or less ensures that there will be a Seek into endgame, where the Seek can become disproportionately powerful. I don't really feel the signet is a good control here. I do have thoughts about whether it's worth trying to save this by giving Elims a Seek discount into endgame, or simply shutting the mechanic once a certain fraction of players are dead. I think both are decent options. (This didn't happen, but imagine TJ in a final five where he didn't control the Seek. That's more problematic to deal with.) I am fine with the RP gate, but also actually feel I should have dropped the threshold to 100 words given I was asking for five posts. In a QF, 200 words RP is brutal for players who don't do this regularly. My recommendation would actually be: drop the rotating Seek, and go back to V!Seeker. But I think if any GM wants to try adapting this, you need to think about what that sort of Seek could be like at endgame. Because it more or less seems to imply a solo Elim is screwed. Anyway, I think that's about it from me in terms of thoughts. Once again, thanks to everyone for playing, and thanks to @Araris Valerian for being a great IM This game taught me a lot about QUERY on spreadsheets >>

Player List: Dossiers I'll post the GM's AAR after I take some painkillers.

Aftermath: Forsworn Water trickled through the clock. Two dead men before him, and the accusing gazes of the company on him. Ripling breathed and studied the crowd assembled before him. Or about him. A single man—borne by the Emperor’s mercy—in a crowd at night, beneath the flickering torches. The sort of image that stuck with you, that might be carefully, painstakingly polished into a poem. The post of lieutenant might have been wine in a jewelled cup. Or it might have been poison. A powerful image: you never knew which the world presented to you. Only the Emperor, in his beneficence. You had to cling to that, to that bedrock. Ripling’d lied about the search he’d conducted with the Captain’s signet seal. But no one had to know. No one, apart from John Bluhm, who’d been so silent that in speaking up now, he appeared to be almost a different man. Perhaps it was just the night. “I had a dream,” Ripling whispered. Lost in the noise, as the others, Mallard, Gaovaris, Fletcher, and John Bluhm all argued about what to do with him. Squabbling beneath the wavering light of the torches. Above, the silver light of the moon, and the quiet trickle of water through the clock. The sort of thing you might have expected the Banished Immortal himself to have captured in his poetry. A sort of immanence, just shy of transcendence. It was all in the ephemerality of it, the transience. (Only the Emperor himself, the splendid scion of the Eighty Suns, was eternal.) Breathing in, Ripling enjoyed what might well be his final moments alive. “I had a dream!” he declared aloud. Blinking, they all turned to stare at him. “Eh?” Mallard managed, at last. Odd, that. You’d think those people’d dreamed more often. “I dreamed that Fletcher was trying to kill me,” Ripling said. Not a lie, this. Odd dream, but one that had remained with him, this Hour. Supposed he should’ve demanded the search, instead of trying to get a spot of sleep. Some remnant of it remained with him, even now. You could imagine dreams were messengers, whispers of the eternal realm. Fragments of the world where the Emperors resided, after they passed from this world and returned to the Eighty Suns in glory. “Kill me, if you must. The Emperor smiles upon me, even in death. Can any of you say the same of yourselves?” Water trickled through the clock. Fletcher the Fetcher had lived a very long time. He wasn’t loyal to the one they called the General. He hadn’t been loyal for a very long time, not since the day his oaths had died. You believed in things, once. You would die, would surrender anything, just anything for your cause. He collected artefacts now, sold some of them. There was a trace of that in Yuen’s remaining loyal soldiers. You could see it in the way they spoke, in the way a man five years dead still moved them to betray new oaths sworn, and to kill. Some part of him wanted that, that memory of what it felt like to believe without constraint, with all his heart, in something. Anything. But there was Kezin too. Cold, they’d said, when he executed Randen without a moment’s hesitation. No doubt that Kezin would kill every last one of them, if he felt it was necessary. Dead eyes. Fletcher knew what it was like, to be forsworn. All of which meant he needed to cut and run. Fletcher did consider it. Not enough Investiture, though. He’d had a little jar of unkeyed Dor, buried at the bottom of his pack. Not enough to get off Sel, perhaps. Maybe enough to get out of this camp. He’d stayed because…because… Well. Enough of that anyway. This was cutting things too close. He reached into his pack for the jar of unkeyed Dor. No point trying to stay, now. Time in the Rose Empire had been good to him, and there was a seal he had been trying to acquire, but it was clearly time to move on. A flash of pain in his fingers. The jar, breaking. Radiance spilling out, leaking. Rolling like quicksilver on the floorboards, among the glass shards. Clutching at his fingers, Fletcher swore. Blood leaked through his fingers, mixing with the Dor. A small jar of unkeyed Dor. Once, it would have been enough. Fletcher breathed. Water trickled through the clock. “He was trying to escape, Captain,” Gaovaris reported. Kezin remembered Jiang’s reports on the man: sloppy swordsman. That’d have to be reviewed, among other things, afterwards. If there was an afterwards. Fletcher sprawled on the dirt of the courtyard, bleeding out. “There was a strange substance on the floor of the sleeping quarters,” Ripling reported. “Bright enough to illuminate, as though it were the Emperor’s eighty virtues. But it was elusive to the touch, and…rolled, despite being liquid.” “So you have no idea if it was a poison and you touched it anyway.” “Sir, we used a stick,” Mallard said. “That wasn’t a duck we wanted to leave about, if we could.” Kezin grunted. “So he was trying to escape. And you know this how?” “Packed his things,” Mallard said. “Gaovaris saw him slip off while everyone was debating. John Bluhm’s dead, by the way. Almost forgot.” Kezin himself had almost forgotten that Bluhm existed. The man had been far too quiet. “And you think Fletcher did it?” “We have an alibi for everyone except Fletcher, sir,” Ripling reported. Largely because everyone in the courtyard had been trying to kill him but the Captain certainly didn’t need to know that. Kezin considered it. “Good enough,” he said. He looked down at Fletcher. “What do you have to say for yourself?” Fletcher looked at him. For a moment, Kezin saw his own eyes reflected: the tiredness that had sunk into his bones, going on. Betrayals that could never be taken back. You were forsworn. And then life, however unfairly, went on. Sometimes you were even rewarded for doing so. Sometimes, oaths were the most cruel thing you could do to a man. Fletcher shrugged. “Gaovaris was trying to kill me,” he said. Kezin didn’t bother glancing over. “Gaovaris?” “He lies, sir,” Gaovaris spat. “I was never alone with him, and didn’t need to hit him in the hand with a knife if I was trying to kill him. As the Sagacious Ci said in his Washing Away of Wrongs, when the testimonies of three are coherent and one is not, the one that is inconsistent is the liar. Sir.” Fade was at the back of the crowd. Kezin met his eyes. Fade nodded. Kezin drew his sword. A single swift stroke. A sharp glint as the keen blade flashed. Fletcher collapsed, blood spraying. “Good work,” Kezin said. “I believe this is the last of them. Someone clean that up, and I want one squad stationed on alert. Otherwise, I think we are in the clear now.” He watched the way they held themselves: the way Gaovaris’s shoulders instantly slumped, the way Ripling drew himself up and started calling out orders in the Emperor’s name, the way Mallard sighed in relief. Enough had died, Kezin thought. The General was dead, five years ago. He’d obeyed an order to betray his oaths, to stand down. He’d clashed with Fade, that day, all the same. He’d watched the corpse drag out, felt the hammering of his heart in his chest. Enough had died. “We are sworn to the Empire, Lieutenant,” General Yuen had said. “Not to me.” There was the implication: the Empire demanded cruel things. Or the factions did. Perhaps they were all unworthy of her. Enough would continue to die. The eighty suns continued, one after another, to bless the Empire with their life-giving light, a single day at a time, before retreating beneath the world, where they fought the darkness, emerging triumphant in glory, in radiance, in light ever after. Fletcher the Fetcher / @|TJ| was executed. He was a Yuen Loyalist! John Bluhm / @Amanuensis was killed! He was a Discovery Soldier! The game has ended! Congratulations to the Village for a near-sweep! And thanks to @Araris Valerian for being an excellent IM I now have filled my dance card with every IM except Striker

Water trickles through the clock. Another Hour has ended! Kolo?

I told my prof that functionally I'm the worst of both worlds: I'm a sceptic that it is really as disruptive and transformative as advocates claim it will be. I do think there are some genuinely awesome use cases: I just think that there's a lot of concomitant ideology no one is really thinking through. Will they replace dollars and cents? Maybe, but we'd need a population that's a lot better at cybersecurity and better cyber defenses for this to work. I point you to how Internet banking (and, to be fair, just increased Internet penetration) has been a major driver of the surge in scams in Singapore. Every year, the situation gets worse, with more cases reported, and increasing amounts lost on the millions. In a world without Internet banking, that doesn't happen because as a scammer or a hacker, I can't empty your bank account as easily. (To be sure, I can certainly get you to issue cheques or send money in aluminium foil-wrapped cardboard boxes (long story, don't ask.) So there's more friction there. Here's the thing. Crypto is this Up To Eleven because suddenly the banks can't reverse the transactions easily (remember, they often can't reverse transactions anyway in the Internet banking paradigm, but now there's actually technical barriers against it.) Maybe you could design a CBDC that would get past this element, but that would probably be a hybrid or private blockchain which is giving up one of the key commitments of crypto ideology. I fully believe a lot of people still do not fully understand private key security: I've also seen cases where people don't remotely understand what permissions they are surrendering when they interact with dodgy smart contracts in an AirDrop and CBA to ask. Do we need a trustless society? Yes and no. There's a well-earned scepticism of authority and government institutions, which makes sense when you realise how much crypto has its roots in the cypherpunks and how that too was grounded by US surveillance scandals. But I think insisting code can replace social institutions and structures and that we henceforth won't need to think about the ideal society or even just our underlying social presumptions is wrongheaded. Trust is normative; reliance is not. In general, I think one should also be wary of any system that suggests that we replace normative incentives with market incentives: it drags us back to the notion that markets are a great way of predicting human behaviour or rationality (!!!! a major red flag!) and then we want to rebuild basic social infrastructure using technology that fundamentally depends on or has market incentives baked into it as a means of replacing social systems. Instead of normative trust, we rely on rational self-interest, which just fails when people get both greedy and stupid.

Done.

"Good," said Kezin. "Then you're lieutenant now. I expect results in an hour, Lieutenant." He walked out of the courtyard.

Rule Clarifications: Player List:

Hour Four: Heritage Water trickled through the clock. Fade was decently certain that Lee was a Glory spy—but also that there were other spies within the compound he had not yet identified. If you lived for long enough, as Fade had, you learned a number of unflinching truths about the realities of the world. Leky, of course, was a spy. She would eventually be thoroughly debriefed by the Svordish when she returned to Svorden. He’d suspicions of some of the other servants and soldiers. The Faction spies right now were the ones of greater concern. A clever move, agitating those still loyal to Yuen. He was certain they were merely useful idiots, and indeed, had made his report to the Senior Arbiter on that presumption. “Five long years,” Senior Arbiter had said, thoughtfully. “They’ve not shown discontent until now,” Fade said. “Mutterings, yes, but any army camp has them. No, someone whispered to them, gave them a way to strike back.” Using one group to fight another was often the better option. Particularly when it left you plausible deniability. “I have no doubt about that,” Wuzhi said. The problem was trying to pin it on someone more definite. From what Fade could tell, events had taken Lee by surprise. So their agitator wasn’t Lee, either. The letter that Georg Wasintown had found was only so helpful. There were coded names, implications that Fade was working to trace, but the clock was against him. He heard the footsteps—the Captain always walked with a fairly distinctive tread—and turned about. “Lieutenant Jiang was one of the traitors,” Kezin said. Never really hid his distaste, though Fade presumed Kezin himself thought he did a good job of it. Still, what Kezin felt was Fade’s business only so far as it portended anything for whether the Captain could still be relied on, or whether the Senior Arbiter’s interests were seriously endangered. “Good work, Captain.” “Why?” Kezin asked, abruptly. He never had questioned, Fade thought. The very last time he’d done so was five years ago. It was difficult not to see the angry young lieutenant, and the older Captain. Standing down Yuen’s forces and allowing their redeployment had done very well for Kezin’s prospects. “I told you why,” Fade said, calmly. “The General has been dead for five years,” Kezin said. “How does anyone hate for such a long time?” “How did you?” Fade riposted; noticed the angry flush as Kezin glared at him. He had to be allowed his little amusements. But he relented. Having the Captain onside at this point of time had its advantages. “Did you really think it was about Yuen all this while?” “If not Yuen, then who?” Fade raised an eyebrow. “We’re in the middle of a quiet war between Factions at the moment, Captain,” he pointed out, clinically. “Everyone senses weakness, given the state of the Rose Throne.” “You don’t know either.” “No,” Fade said. “That’s your job, Captain. Eliminate the last of Yuen’s loyalists, while I find out who actually has been trying to stir them into action. Just keep doing exactly what you’ve been doing, and make enough noise to flush them out.” Water trickled through the clock. Krow Nelcaf—after all this time, a lieutenant, something he could barely bring himself to quite believe—stilled himself, resisted the urge to pace, and watched the other soldiers arguing. A few candidates came to mind. Gaovaris—the scholar kept sneaking off to practise his sword-strokes, as though developing a sudden passion for swordsmanship would save his hide from the Captain’s sword…and perhaps give him a convenient excuse to evade suspicion. Then there was Mallard. She claimed that Georg had taken her into confidence, but really, just about anyone would’ve claimed that at this point. There was a certain implication to it. Krow thought of it as ‘innocence by association.’ He also thought it was probably like the fungi they’d eaten that harsh winter campaign. Ripling continued to declaim poems to the glory of the Emperor, but Krow had a distrust of the pretty words the man used. And there was the soldier who sold goods in his spare time. Fletcher, that was the name. The way Krow saw it, he could be smuggling any varieties of contraband into the compound. Left and Right had both been flagged as being suspicious, and Krow understood why. For one, they’d both defected from the Heritage Faction. For another, the pair worked together sword-by-scabbard. You very rarely saw Left—or for that matter, Right—operating alone. For good or for ill, everyone in the company understood that the two were a package deal. Which meant that if one of them was a traitor, so was the other one. And yet, a nagging voice at the back of his mind whispered doubt. It sounded, Krow would admit, disturbingly like the voice of the man he’d just seen the Captain cut down, an hour ago. Questioning their loyalties was one thing. But wasn’t he damned for his thoughts all the same? “You have your orders, Lieutenant,” the General had said. Cool as meltwater. Sometimes, Kezin hated the man. The General bled—he’d seen as much. But maybe he had no bones but duty. He knew that wasn’t true, now. He’d watched as they dragged the body out and burned it. “You’re bloody insane, that’s what you are,” Kezin spat. “We believed in you. They aren’t worth the dust on your boots.” “I will not tell you again,” the General said. “When they ask it of you…tell the men to stand down.” “You ask for more than can be delivered,” Kezin said. Had dared to say. General Yuen laughed, and it was a ghost of a smile that flickered across his face, briefly. As though he was already a ghost, and no longer flesh and blood. “I told you once, when you first served under me. I said I would not ask of you the impossible.” “You lied, sir.” But he’d done it, after all. And something in him had probably died, that day the General demanded it of him. Kezin knew why. Or thought he did. Fade thought otherwise. If you focused enough on your duty, none of it mattered. He could be as harsh as they all made him. Left eased into the sleeping quarters, trailing Right with ease. She’d noticed the moment Right had slipped away, as the rest of the soldiers were arguing over the former Lieutenant Jiang’s complicity and what that meant for everyone. She had kept herself concealed, even as Right had stopped by their bed and started rifling through the chest that stored their personal belongings. Something told her, however reluctantly, that this was going to be ugly. Some things were better seen with her own eyes. When Right picked up the scytale, she felt a bright, sharp blade of pain bloom in her heart like the first grass of spring. “After all this while,” Left said, quietly. She couldn’t help herself, stepping forward. She didn’t have the heart to do anything else, to act as though the earth hadn’t tilted beneath her, throwing her off. “I thought we’d agreed to defect from Heritage. Give up Senior Arbiter Kurishina’s schemes.” “In exchange for Senior Arbiter Wuzhi’s schemes?” Right scoffed. “For what?” Left thought she could see it, just a little. One way or another, it was a game of stones, and they were all just pieces, every last one of them. But it didn’t take away the pain when she breathed, the dawning sense that she’d badly misread the shape of events in the last few years. Or maybe it was Right who had. “Heritage needed eyes in Discovery,” Right continued. “Whoever Wuzhi’s spymaster is, he’s good. Our last three spies were all killed. Which means, dear Left, that we needed our cover to be impeccable.” Left closed her eyes. It wasn’t that Right had lied to her. They all lied. Sometimes, Left thought she lied just to keep in practice. It was the realisation that she’d simply been used. Used to purchase their way, Heritage’s way, into Discovery. For what? To what end? Ten years. Ten long years, sharing this life together, and Left realised that she didn’t recognise the other half of her being. She didn’t like Senior Arbiter Wuzhi. This much was true. She thought he had too many grand plans, too many ambitions. He treated everyone like pieces in a game of stones, and even if it was true, it wasn’t something that made the man likeable. She knew all of this, and still she’d given her loyalties truthfully. Still, she had meant to run from Kurishina, and all this while, Right was running back to her, like a lapdog, and— —And there were no words for it, and every last thing was a black smear of pain across her vision. Oh. Right drew the bloodied dagger away. “I can’t leave you to talk about it,” she said. Left liked to think that the words cost her, liked to think that she mattered, must have mattered to Right, that something about those ten long years hadn’t been a lie. She looked over, at Right, at someone who had turned out, after all, to have been a complete stranger, and realised what she was in fact feeling. Anger. One hand holding in the blood leaking through her fingers, the other hand holding her own dagger, Left said, “This ends. Now.” They’d joined the Discovery Faction together, running away from Heritage together. She inhaled, and the movement hurt. Good. They could leave this world together, too. Water trickled through the clock. Kezin made his way to the courtyard, but found only a mass of concerned soldiers a hair’s breadth away from panicking. He drew Mallard aside. “What is it?” he demanded. “And where’s Nelcaf?” Nights, he’d had to remember not to instinctively seek out Jiang, to remember that he’d killed the soldier himself for treachery. Nelcaf seemed a decent choice, but if Nelcaf couldn’t even be bothered to report on time… “Dead, sir,” Mallard replied, her face ashen. “Sir, I have to say, I’ve seen some things in my time, but whoever killed Lieutenant Nelcaf was one sick duck, sir.” Kezin raised an eyebrow, nothing more. Mallard looked at his boots. “I’ll be the judge of that,” Kezin growled, when he realised he was not going to get anything more out of her. “Show me what’s going on.” Mallard led him to the gathering crowd, who gave way as Kezin viciously elbowed his way through them. “Ah, Captain,” Fade said, calmly. “Good. You’re here. I was going to send for you, sir.” Kezin really thought his day couldn’t get worse. And then he looked at Nelcaf’s corpse, and realised it had. “It’s an exotic poison, sir,” Fade said. “As far as I can tell.” One of the soldiers lost the battle against nausea. The sound of retching seemed to echo in the courtyard. “And the tree?” Kezin made himself ask. Made himself remain composed. The General had taught him that. The last thing any of them needed was the soldiers watching him lose his own dinner. Fade canted his shoulders in a shrug. “Creativity, I expect. You’ll need a new lieutenant now, I suppose, sir. Again.” “Don’t tempt me to name you,” Kezin ground out. He could hold on to the anger at least. It was…comforting. There were monsters in this world. Kezin knew that. Had known that, since the day the army stood down. Since five years ago. You never forgave yourself, not really. But he'd never forgiven the General either, or Fade. He held on to that, as Fade called for someone brave enough to take Nelcaf down. Left and Right / @Devotary of Spontaneity was killed! They were both Discovery Soldiers! Krow Nelcaf / @xinoehp512 was killed! He was a Discovery Soldier! Hour Four has begun! It will end at 0000hrs on Saturday, 27th May 2023, at 0000hrs SGT (GMT +8). I will now begin to send out SP PMs. Remember to let me know if you notice a discrepancy in your SP! The completely flavour position of Lieutenant is now open for the first player who asks for the job. Be warned it seems to be a job of death >>