Amanuensis

Basically if no one voted, the player with the least rupees would be killed (form of inactivity filter). Rupees spent on Masks and PMs are still counted for this, however, so you don't need to worry about saving your money for tie breaker protection

I clarified this in thread previously, but only D1-A has no exe. All other days have mandatory exes

No. They will die for the parity check, but then everyone is resurrected / sent back in time before they get the chance to see the doc.

10 villagers beats 4 elims, but 9 does not (4 * 2.5 = 10). Elims can't win this loop if every kill is blocked or withheld (assuming no elim is executed).

I'm going through to do activity counts. From this point on, I am no longer going to allow bucket overflows, as I think we're deep enough into both discussion and RP to warrant 5 rupees per category. Also because it's easier to just stop at 5 when some of y'all already have 10+ discussion posts approximately 3 hours and 50 minutes remain in the day to vote and submit actions (including PMs).

Sorry if I didn't make this clearer in the rules. The entire loop will always finish. The game will only end early if one team wins the first 3 loops, as the 4th is pointless

Ap the Apprentice The seeds were small and hard and fit her new hands better than she expected. Someone had passed them down the line — she didn't see who, only felt them land in her cupped palms, a handful of Deku seeds that smelled of dry earth and the particular sharpness of things stored a long time in a small space. She looked at them. She looked at the Peahats spinning closer and the Skulltulas dropping from the canopy and Danna already moving, sword drawn, toward the largest concentration of monsters, her two remaining escort Wards fanning out behind her. The Apprentice did the math that her grandfather had always said was the most important kind: what do I have, and what does someone else need. She loaded the first seed without knowing exactly how she knew to do it — the body knew, the way it had known how to spin and how to bubble, some inherited fluency in being what it currently was — and sent it into the nearest Skulltula's joint where the leg met the body. The creature seized and stumbled, and Squircle was already there to finish it, and she was already loading the next one. She found her range quickly. She was not strong enough to drop anything — not the Peahats, whose spinning deflected direct shots, nor the larger Wolfos crashing through the undergrowth at the column's eastern edge — but she was fast and accurate and small enough to move through the gaps between fighters without disrupting them. A seed to the eye of the Peahat bearing down on Amora's left side, buying half a second, which was enough. A seed to the exposed back of a Skulltula that had gotten behind the line near Kieran, drawing its attention. She stayed in motion, reading the shape of the fight the way her grandfather had taught her to read a room — not any one thing in it but all of it, the whole arrangement, where the weight was and where it was about to move. The Wolfos came out of the trees in a shape that was more intelligent than animalistic — too direct, too purposeful, the kind of charge that suggested intention rather than instinct. Its target was Danna, who had put herself between it and the civilian center of the column, which was either excellent tactical positioning or the product of being the sort of person who stepped in front of things by reflex. Possibly both. The Apprentice fired twice in quick succession — eye, then shoulder joint — and neither shot stopped the Wolfos but both made it stumble, and that was all Danna needed. She'd been reading the angle the whole time, waiting for exactly the kind of disruption that a fast, accurate seed-shooter could provide, and she went low and left and let the Wolfos carry itself past her on its own momentum and hit it at the base of the skull with everything she had as it went by. The sound it made when it went down carried. The Skulltulas heard it, or felt it, or registered it through whatever sense wild things use to understand when the calculus of a fight has changed. The Peahats were already slowing their spin — spent, or sensing something the Apprentice couldn't name — while the Stalchildren at the east bank remained in the shadows, milling with the anxious aimlessness of things that had lost a signal they'd been following. One by one, and then in clusters, the wildlife pulled back into the trees. Not routed — retreating, with the deliberate quality of weapon that had been pointed at something and were now being pointed elsewhere. The swamp settled back into its own noise. Danna was breathing hard. She stood over the dead Wolfos and looked at the column — the civilians intact, two of her escort Wards down and being attended to, three Deku Scouts who would not be getting up — and her face did the thing Vicsen's face did when it was processing a number it didn't want to accept. Then it stopped doing that and became a face with a job. "Status," she said. The answers came back: no civilian casualties. Two Wards injured but mobile. The Deku Scouts — and here the surviving Scrubs made sounds that needed no translation. Danna listened and nodded and did not look away from them while she did it. "We honor them when we reach the Palace," she said. "Right now we move." The Swamp Tourist Center was a building that had been built for a more peaceful relationship with the Southern Swamp than the Southern Swamp was currently offering. It sat on a platform above the waterline with a dock extending out over water the color of strong tea, and two flat-bottomed boats tied to it that had been designed for leisurely sightseeing and were about to be used for something considerably less leisurely. A Deku attendant stood at the dock's edge with the expression of someone who had been processing the morning's events for several hours and had not finished. Danna did the math at a glance. "Two boats, twenty each if we press it." She looked at the column — the better part of three hundred people, the wounded, the children, the ones who had fought and the ones who hadn't, strung out along the dock platform and back up the swamp path as far as she could see. The smoke from the settlement was darker than it had been twenty minutes ago. "We go in groups. First boat leaves now." She turned to face the column, the full weight of what she was about to say visible in the way she held herself — the youngest of Vicsen's senior recruits, standing on a dock in a swamp at dawn with a dead monsters behind her and a burning settlement ahead. "I'll take the vanguard," she said. "Half of the Clock Wards with me, and the Deku Scouts who can fight. I need volunteers from the civilians — anyone who came through in that fight and can come through in another one." She held the silence for a moment. "Whatever is happening at the Palace, we need to reach it before it finishes happening." She looked at the length of the column stretching back up the swamp path — three hundred people, most of them exhausted, many of them hurt, none of them done yet. "The boats come back for the next group and the next after that. Someone capable needs to stay with the column each time, manage the crossings, keep the rear together until everyone is through. That's not lesser work." She said it plainly, without softening it. "The ones still on this bank need protecting as much as the ones who've already crossed. I'd rather they arrive intact than arrive fast." The water lapped against the dock's supports. The choice was there, plain as the smoke in the sky: go ahead into whatever was burning, or hold the line here and bring the rest through. Both mattered. Both needed doing. Danna was not going to tell anyone which one to choose. She untied the first boat herself and looked back at the volunteers — at the ones who had stepped forward and the ones who hadn't yet — and at the small Deku girl near the dock's edge who had supported Danna's final blow. "First boat," Danna said. "Let's go." RP Quest: Join Danna's vanguard and rush to the Deku Palace OR Remain behind to protect the waiting civilians

This is a flipless game, for the record deaths are announced (no one has died) but not alignment or items

Pinch Hit Announcement: @Stick. has replaced @Honors Ghost. Everyone give Stick a warm welcome and wish HG well (they're okay, just very busy IRL)

I do have tomorrow off from uni due to a snowstorm, so I will probably progress us to the next scene around 1 PM EST in preparation for turnover / how I want the night to start. I just finished catching up on my homework for next week and did some exam studying, so my brain is too fried atm.

So, yeah. The Postman is technically delivering the letters, so if someone gives me a letter before they are executed, it will still be sent. However if the Postman is executed no letters are sent. Since all Masks break upon the holder's death, they'd be lost permanently. Rupees too would not be refunded, as they'd break upon the Postman's death. Regarding targeting, if you send a letter, you are technically targeting the Postman (i.e. no real effect), and then the Postman targets every player they deliver letters too.

A single post could be half discussion and half RP, so that would count for 2

Ap the Apprentice The florist approached the way careful people approach unfamiliar animals — without sudden movement, without pretending the strangeness wasn't there, which the Apprentice appreciated more than she could currently express. Most of the people on the road had looked at her and then looked away with the particular speed of those who had already processed one too many impossible things before sunrise and had decided to stop accepting new ones. This one looked, and kept looking, and then walked over. "Hello. My name is Thistle. I'm a florist." The Apprentice looked at her. She looked at Squircle, who was listening with his arms folded and the expression of a person who had been trying to solve a problem for several hours and was genuinely pleased that someone else was attempting it. She looked back at Thistle. She tried. She always tried, because trying was the thing she had left. She pointed at herself. She held up both hands — not-quite hands, woody and strange at the ends of arms that bent differently than she was used to — and made the shape of something being removed, like a mask being lifted, and pointed at herself again underneath where the mask would be. A person. There is a person. She pointed at the Deku mask — her face, her face — and made the shape again. Not this. Something under this. Normal. Girl. Thistle's brow furrowed with the focused effort of someone genuinely trying to receive the message. The Apprentice let out a breath that came out as a low, reedy chord, and sat with the frustration of it. She had been sitting with the frustration of it since the shop, when she had tried to ask her grandfather a question and produced a sound like a flute that had not been taught language yet. There was a lot happening in her chest that had nowhere to go. Her grandfather was behind her, somewhere in the smoke she was walking away from, and the road kept moving under her smaller, stranger feet, and the moon was up there doing what it was doing, and she was not in her body, and she could not say any of it. A Clock Ward fell into step on her other side — one of the escort pair Vicsen had assigned to this group before he turned back toward the city, a woman in her thirties with a practical face and a crossbow she kept tilted away from the crowd out of training or courtesy or both. "If you're trying to talk to her," she said to Thistle, without judgment, "you won't get much until we reach the settlement. The Scrubs who came out to help — the ones who know the common tongue — they've mostly gone on ahead to warn the Queen." The Apprentice nodded, frowning. She pointed ahead, down the road, and made the shape of waiting with her hands — *soon* — and hoped it translated. Squircle said nothing, but something in his posture shifted slightly. Relief, maybe. Or at least the adjustment a person makes when a problem acquires a timeline. The road south ran out of Clock Town's stone and became packed earth, and then the earth became softer and darker and began to smell of green things and standing water, and somewhere around the halfway point the trees thickened on both sides and the light changed — filtered through canopy now, what little of the dawn had been making it through the smoke — and the Southern Swamp accepted them the way all swamps accept visitors: with complete indifference, and the immediate sense that the indifference might not last. The Deku Scrubs at the front of the column heard it first. It was not a sound exactly, or not only a sound — more a shift in the quality of the air, the way the noise of the swamp changed pitch the way a voice changes when it's trying not to say something. Then one of the Scrubs made a sharp clicking sound and the column slowed, and then the Ward at the front called *hold* and the column stopped, and the Apprentice went up on the tips of her new feet and looked. The Skulltulas came out of the canopy. Not one, not two — a cascade of them, dropping on silk from the branches above the road's edge, Gold Skulltulas and their smaller kin, which had no business being aggressive and were being aggressively aggressive, their legs moving in the fast territorial pattern that meant something had frightened them into attacking anything that moved. Behind them and to the left, a flock of Peahats came spinning out of the undergrowth without the usual warning display, straight to contact, their bladed petals catching the filtered light in arcs. Further back, deeper in the trees, something large was crashing through the undergrowth with the blind insistence of an animal that had stopped thinking and started running. And from the south-east, from deeper in the swamp, where the settlement should have been — smoke. Not thin smoke, not cook-fire smoke. The dark, committed kind. "Stalchildren on the east bank," the forward Ward shouted. "And something's spooked the Wolfos — I can hear them — " The Ward commander — not Vicsen, Danna, the youngest of his senior recruits and the one he'd left in charge of the escort — stepped out of the column and looked at the canopy and the smoke and the Peahats spinning closer and made the calculation in the way trained people make calculations, fast and without sentiment. "Escort Wards, stay with the column." He drew his sword. "Defensive perimeter, civilians in the center — you know the positions." He turned to the column, the full sweep of it, the refugees and the road-worn and the ones who had been marching all night on nothing. "Anyone with combat experience, I am asking for volunteers. Step forward now." He held eye contact with no one specific and everyone generally. "The Dekus' settlement is ahead and we need to reach it. Whatever is in this swamp between us and it, we need to move through it. I need people who can help me do that." The Peahats were thirty yards out and closing. The Apprentice looked at her not-quite hands. She thought about the bubbles in her chest, the spin, the way the body knew things she hadn't taught it yet. She thought about the looters on the floor of the shop, and then she stopped thinking and looked at Squircle. She pointed at the Peahats. She pointed at herself. Then she pointed at him, with the particular quality of pointing that meant: *together, and now, and are you ready.* Behind them, through the canopy, the smoke from the settlement rose in a column against the morning sky. It was getting darker. Whatever was happening in Woodfall was not waiting for them to arrive before getting worse. RP Quest: Fend off the aggravated wildlife on your way to Woodfall!

In the exploded city, or?

LG110, Day 2-A: Bound for Woodfall Day 2-A will end on Monday, February 23rd @ 10:00 PM EST. Ap the Apprentice The building across the street came down in two stages — a crack like a held breath breaking, and then the low continuous thunder of everything following gravity's instruction at once. The shop windows shook. A fox mask fell from its nail and landed face-up on the floor, smiling at the ceiling. "No." The Happy Mask Salesman put his hand briefly on Squircle's arm and straightened. "There isn't time. And it won't come off." He said it the way he said most things — with the particular patience of someone who had already considered and discarded the argument on the other side. Then he looked at his granddaughter. She was already shaking her head. Her not-quite-hands were making the shape of refusal, of insistence, of every variation on I am not leaving that she could produce without words. Her new eyes were very large and very bright and he knew what was in them as well as he'd ever known anything. He smiled. It was the slow smile, the one that had more years in it than he usually showed. He crossed the room and knelt in front of her and held her not-quite-face in both his hands, the way he had when she was small and frightened and the masks on the walls were too many and too strange. "Listen," he said. "I am old. I am tired in ways that a good night's sleep has stopped fixing. And if the Dreamers wanted me dead—" he glanced at the four men still on the floor "—they had their chances." His thumbs moved along the edge of the Deku mask, gently, acknowledging it without dwelling on it. "They want something from me. That means I have time that you do not have." His hands dropped to her shoulders. "So you are going to go. And I am going to be here when you get back. That is not a hope. That is a decision." Outside, a Clock Ward's whistle cut through the dark, followed by a voice bellowing the same word over and over: South. South. South Ward. "There is a woman," he said, and his voice dropped into the register he used for important things, the one she'd learned to hear underneath all the other registers. "Professor Kashika. Daughter of Professor Shikashi, who ran the Astral Observatory before the years caught up with him. Last I heard, she was somewhere in Woodfall — near the Deku settlement, if she's still following her father's work." He looked up at Squircle briefly, making sure the name landed for him too, then back to her. "I don't know what's coming. I don't know yet how bad it is. But I know that before the Dreamers arrived tonight, someone else had already been here." His voice stayed steady. "Someone I never heard. Never saw. And when I woke up, Majora's Mask was gone." The floor creaked somewhere below them. The passage. "Kashika will have answers I don't. And if you need help reaching her — or after—" He squeezed her shoulders once. "The Bomber's Secret Society of Justice has people in every region of Termina. Woodfall, Snowhead, the Great Bay, and Ikana Canyon. They've been driven underground here but they are not gone. Kashika has connections to them. She can open doors." His eyes moved between the two of them. "I don't know what you'll find. I don't know what I'm sending you into. But I know that standing still is the one thing that will certainly help no one." He stood. He reached up and straightened her cap — then stopped, his hand finding only the smooth round head of a Deku scrub, and laughed once, softly, to himself. "She'll know how to help you with that too," he said. From below, footsteps. More than before. Getting closer with the unhurried certainty of people who do not think they will be stopped. "Go," he said. Not the warm version, the one that sent her to Carnivals. The other one. The one that meant it. He turned toward the passage door. Squircle's hand closed around her arm and she went because her grandfather had said to, because he was already walking away from her and toward the sound of the footsteps and because the part of her that wanted to stay was the same part that knew, with a cold and absolute clarity, that he was right. She went through the shop door and the bell above it laughed and she did not look back. Behind her, she heard the Happy Mask Salesman's voice drift up from the passage, unhurried and clear: "Good evening, gentlemen. Shall we try this again?" The South Gate was ahead. The moon was enormous. The road toward Woodfall was open. Together, the deku girl and the haggard stranger ran. Commander Vicsen The sun came up the way it always did, indifferent to what it was illuminating. Vicsen stood at the edge of the Woodfall road and watched it happen — the sky going from black to the particular bruised grey that preceded color, the outlines of trees and people and the ruined skyline of Clock Town sharpening one degree at a time — and tried to make the numbers work. He had been trying for the last hour. They did not work. There was no version of the accounting in which they worked. He turned away from the sunrise and looked at his city instead. Four of the Clock Tower's five spires still stood. The fifth was gone at the base, sheared off cleanly enough that it must have come down fast, all at once, before anyone below had time to understand what was happening. The West Ward was smoke. The smoke was not the grey of dying fires but the darker color of things still burning, slow and committed. He could not see the Mayor's Manor from here. He had not been able to raise anyone stationed there on any signal. The Wards who had been assigned to defend the Manor had not come out of the gates with the others. They had not come out at all. "Commander." Danna was behind him. She had not slept. None of them had. She was holding a count — a rough one, tallied on the back of her field notes — and her face said everything her voice wasn't. "Tell me," he said. "Confirmed evacuees through South Gate: four thousand, roughly. I say roughly because we stopped counting around the third hour and started moving." She paused. "The North Ward — we don't have numbers. A lot of people who lived in the North Ward didn't—" She stopped. Finished differently. "We don't have numbers." "We'll get them later." He took the field notes. He looked at the count without seeing it. "Escort squads." "Rennik's got twenty civilians heading for Romani Ranch. He left an hour ago." She hesitated. "He took the ones who couldn't walk fast. Families. He said he'd come back." Vicsen nodded. Rennik had seven years on the rest of them and a sister who farmed the south road. He would know what the Ranch could hold. He looked out over the scattered mass of people on the Woodfall road — hundreds of them, sitting or standing or moving with the stunned slowness of those who had been moving all night and could not yet stop. Deku Scrubs had come out of the swamp at some point in the small hours, drawn by the noise or the smoke or some instinct that Vicsen didn't pretend to understand, and had begun moving through the crowd with food and water and the particular grave hospitality of a people long familiar with disaster arriving at their doorstep. He watched a Scrub child offer a piece of flatbread to an elderly Gerudo woman who took it with both hands. Neither of them spoke. He looked up. The moon had been at the edge of his awareness all night — he had trained himself, over the hours, to keep it in his peripheral vision the way he kept the Clock Tower in his peripheral vision, a fixed reference point for orientation. What it was telling him now was the same thing it had been telling him for the last two hours, and the message was not improving. It was closer. Not falling the way a stone falls, not fast, not yet — but measurably, undeniably closer than it had been at midnight, and its expression had finished whatever transition it had been in the middle of when the night began. It was not serene anymore. It was not curious. He did not have a word for what it was. He had a feeling for it, the feeling that lives at the back of the neck when something is watching you and does not have good intentions, and he had been carrying that feeling for four hours. He turned to Danna. "The Woodfall escort needs to leave within the hour," he said. "Capable adults in the outside positions, vulnerable civilians in the center. Anyone who looks like they can hold something other than a child's hand, put them on the perimeter." He scanned the crowd again, the same way he'd scanned the plaza — looking for the ones who were frightened and functional, who were waiting for someone to tell them where to stand. He found several. He found one in particular: a small figure near the road's edge, Deku-shaped and too still to be sleeping, sitting with her knees drawn up and her face turned toward the ruined skyline with an expression that needed no translation. Beside her, a road-worn young man in scratched leather who was watching the crowd with the careful eyes of someone who had been useful recently and was ready to be useful again. He filed them both. "I'll want people I can trust with that escort," he continued. "People who know how to move a group and keep their heads. I'll speak to them before we send them off." He looked back at the city. "After I've done something else." Danna followed his gaze. "The Manor," she said. "The Manor." He clipped his whistle back onto his belt. "Almira, Kael, and Forth. My best three, and they know it, so they'll come without being asked." He paused. "If I'm not back by the time the escort is ready to move—" "You'll be back," Danna said, with the firmness of someone who needs the thing they're saying to be true. He looked at her. "If I'm not back," he said, evenly, "you send the escort without me. You keep them moving. You find Commander Ishala at Woodfall if she's still stationed there and you tell her everything." He held her eyes until she nodded, properly this time, without the firmness. "Good." He turned back toward the road. The Deku girl had moved — she was standing now, looking in his direction, and there was something in the posture of her that was familiar in a way he couldn't immediately locate. Something of someone who had heard someone else be told what to do and had started doing it in their head before anyone asked them. He would talk to her before he left. He would talk to all of them, the ones with that quality, the ones who were frightened and still watching. There was an escort that needed leading and a road that needed walking and a settlement at the end of it that needed warning. He did not know what was happening under the Clock Tower. He did not know who wore the wrong mask in the sky last night or where they had gone or whether they were done. He did not know what was happening in the Mayor's Manor or why his Wards had not come out. He had, in short, a very great number of things he did not know, which was not a feeling he was accustomed to managing well. What he knew was four thousand people had made it through the South Gate. What he knew was the Woodfall road was open. What he knew was the sun had come up, as suns do, and the day was here whether anyone was ready for it or not. He had run the scenario four hundred and twelve times. He had not run this one. But the principle underneath it was always the same, and he carried it the way he carried everything useful: close, and without ceremony. Move the people. Keep them moving. Keep them safe. Vicsen walked back into the smoking ruins of his home. RP Quest: Accompany the refugee escort to Woodfall. Lots of people died. Just not any of you. Players can now vote to remove one of their own from the Loop. The Postman's Hat has been donned and PMs can now be sent via your GM PM. Note: Y'all can RP your votes and such if you want. I would probably recommend beginning with an in-character discussion of last night's events. It's clear that, in order for so many explosives to go off around the city, the perpetrators would need to be many, rather than just a single new Skull Kid. Who really knows who exactly is involved. Ap cannot communicate with non-Dekus, but I could see Squircle bringing up the Dreamers to others, inquiring if anyone knows about them and suggesting they could be responsible. The exact threat of MoM's will become increasingly more apparent as this Loop progresses, but for now, y'all just suspect there are baddies afoot, and that's where the paranoia begins setting in. Feel free to interact with random NPC Clock Wards and refugees, if you wish. I am likely to do more mid-turn RP prompts as we make our way into Woodfall. Player List 0 Amanuensis Ap the Apprentice 1 @The Unknown Order Heroshi 2 @Araris Valerian Arenta 3 @Wahrheitswächter Wahi 4 @Ashbringer Coliver 5 @coco.pudding Amora 6 @|TJ| Cosmetica 7 @Honors Ghost meeee 8 @Haelbarde Link the Goron 9 @Wonko the Sane Zymni 10 @Doc12 Thistle 11 @Burnt Spaghetti Cindra 12 @CoderDrag0n8 Squircle 13 @Mistfallen Soldier Kieran 14 @Divergent Gor Elam the Goron 15 @Archer Ouae the Zora 16 @Hoid Slayer Avery

Night 1-A is now over. Please get a snack, a drink, and standby for Day 2-A.

5 minutes remain.

One hour remains

I did yes, I will have to continue Ap's side of events in the next write up

Btw in order to set up the day turn, I will definitely need the whole crew evacuating to the South Gate, so if you all wanna RP that then awesome, if not I'll take care of it in the next Day write up

Commander Vicsen Vicsen had run the scenario four hundred and twelve times. He knew this because he had started counting in the third year after the Carnival resumed, when he realized that running it in his head while his subordinates drilled was more useful than watching subordinates who already knew what he was going to correct. Four hundred and twelve iterations of the same fundamental problem: a city shaped like a cross, four gates, one clock tower, forty thousand people who did not want to leave and would not leave efficiently even when they did. He had run it in the rain, in fog, in the particular chaos of the Hero's Carnival when the roads were thick with tourists who did not know which ward led where. He had run it with one gate and with none and with all of them compromised. He had not, until tonight, run it with the moon making that face. He registered it the way he registered most things that were trying to kill him — with his peripheral vision, calmly, in the middle of doing something else. The something else was catching Recruit Almira before she went down under the first wave of the crowd, hauling her vertical by the collar and putting her back on her feet without breaking stride. "North Gate first," he said. "Go." She went. He had placed his eight recruits in a ring around the plaza because he had run this scenario and he knew where the choke points formed and he wanted bodies at each of them before the bodies were needed. The problem with new recruits was that they understood orders and not the reasoning behind them, which meant they executed the letter of an instruction and froze at the first thing the instruction hadn't covered. He had spent three months trying to teach them the reasoning. He had run out of months before he had run out of recruits who needed teaching. Tonight was going to be an examination. He cleared the plaza's south end in twenty strides and hit East Street at a run and already knew what he was going to find before he found it: the East Gate locked up solid with people, fifty deep, all of them pushing in the same direction, which meant nobody was moving because you cannot all go through a door at once no matter how badly you want to. He'd seen this before. Not here, not like this, but thirty-three years ago in a different emergency with a different mayor and the same fundamental human problem of everyone reaching for the exit simultaneously. "STOP." He had a voice for crowds. He had developed it deliberately, the way he had developed everything deliberately, by finding the pitch and the register that cut through ambient noise and landed in the chest rather than the ears. Fifty people stopped. "Single file. NOW. You — " he pointed at a broad-shouldered Goron who was approximately the width of the gate itself "— you are not going through that door, you are going to stand beside it and you are going to pull people through one at a time and you are going to do it calmly and you are going to keep doing it until I tell you to stop. Can you do that?" The Goron blinked at him. Then nodded, once, with the solidity of someone who was glad to have been given a thing to do. "Good. Everyone else: line. Single. Now." They lined. People will do almost anything if someone tells them with enough certainty that it is the thing to do. He left the Goron to his work and ran. The North Gate was worse. He heard it before he saw it — the sound a crowd makes when it is not a crowd anymore but a compression, when the human instinct to move forward meets the physical impossibility of doing so and the result is a kind of low continuous distress, punctuated by individual voices rising above it and getting swallowed again. He came around the corner and stopped for half a second to assess. The gate was intact. The gate was also unreachable, because the press of bodies between him and it was eight rows deep and the rows were not moving. And then the second explosion hit the North Gate directly, and the gate was not intact anymore. He had been knocked flat twice in his life before tonight. He did not enjoy it either time and he did not enjoy it now. He was on his feet before he had consciously decided to stand, which was muscle memory doing his job for him, and he took in the situation: the gate arch was down, rubble across the road, two people he could see immediately who needed immediate attention. He went to the nearest one first. "Can you move?" he said. The man nodded, dazed. "Then move. North is gone. South Ward. Tell everyone you pass: South Ward, South Gate, stay moving." He helped him up, pointed him, moved to the next. He worked through the rubble with the mechanical focus of someone who has separated feeling from function and stored the feeling somewhere to be retrieved later, when there was a later. The gate was gone but the road was passable if people moved in single file along the left edge, and he had a Ward whistle somewhere — he found it, blew three short blasts which was the all-hands signal, and waited. Recruit Almira appeared from the direction of East Street. Her helm was gone and she had a cut above her eye that she hadn't noticed yet. "East Gate?" "Clear. Goron's got it." He nodded. "West." Her face told him before she said it. "Structural damage," she said. "Both sides of the arch. It's leaning." "Leaning or down?" "Leaning." "Then it's still a gate. Get everyone through it before it decides otherwise. Take Rennik." He scanned the crowd around them, looking for the quality of person he needed — the ones who were frightened but not frozen, who were looking for someone to tell them what to do rather than simply screaming. He found a young Zora woman standing at the edge of the rubble with her hands at her sides and her eyes moving, cataloguing. "You," he said. "What's your name?" "Mira," she said, without flinching. Good. "Mira. You're going to the West Gate. Recruit Almira will tell you what to do when you get there. You will do it. Can you run?" She was already running. He turned south. The South Gate was the best case and he had known it would be — he had positioned his two most experienced recruits there precisely because it was the most critical egress point and experience was the thing he had least of to spend. The road to Woodfall was open and the gate was holding and the flow of people through it was not clean but it was moving, and moving was what mattered. He stood at the edge of the plaza and watched the river of people pouring south and made himself breathe for a moment. Above the Clock Tower, the moon had changed its expression again. He had stood in front of the old Mayor thirty-three years ago and argued for evacuation while the man deliberated and the clock ticked, and he had not persuaded him, and the city had been saved anyway by a boy with an ocarina and a capacity for the impossible that Vicsen had respected enormously without understanding at all. He had thought about that conversation many times since. He had thought about what it meant that he had been right and had not been listened to, and what it meant that being right had not been enough, and what a person was supposed to do with that. What he had done with it was four hundred and twelve iterations. "Commander." Recruit Danna was at his elbow — the youngest of them, seventeen, who had joined the Wards because her older brother had and who had the instinct for it even if she didn't yet have the training. She was looking at the plaza, at the people still pouring through it toward the South Gate, at the scattered ones who had fallen and hadn't gotten up yet, at the few standing still in the particular paralyzed way that meant they had someone they hadn't found yet. "What do you need?" she said. He looked at her. He looked at the plaza. He thought about the tunnel reports he'd filed twice in the last year about sounds coming from the underground system beneath the Tower, which had gone into the filing system and come out the other side without visible effect. He thought about the Carnival stage, which was empty now, and the man in the wrong mask who was no longer in the sky. "I need anyone who is still standing and not screaming," he said, "to help me get everyone else out through the South Gate. After that I need to know what's happening under this Tower. I suspect it's connected." He straightened his helm. "Can you find me people like that?" Danna turned and looked at the crowd with the assessing eye he'd been trying to teach for three months. "I think so," she said. "Then go." She went. He pulled out his whistle again and blew a long single note — not a Ward signal, just a sound to cut through noise, to give the panicking crowd something external to orient to — and then he raised his voice one more time to the dark and the smoke and the impossible face of the moon that was still, still coming closer, and he said the thing he had practiced saying for thirty-three years in four hundred and twelve imagined emergencies: "SOUTH GATE. EVERYONE. MOVE." And they moved.

Approximately 4 hours remain in the Night to finish earning your Cycle 1 Rupees + submit any actions if relevant

What Ap currently looks like btw Anyway, pro-tip, for a short window after pasting anything, there is a small pop up you can click to reformat the rich text to the site's default, near the bottom right of the text box

Ap the Apprentice It happened very fast and very quietly, which was why it took her a moment to understand what had happened at all. One instant the man with the sword was watching her across the shop with that patient, knowing stillness. The next he was on the floor, and someone was standing where he had been, and the sword was not at her grandfather's throat anymore. The Apprentice blinked her new eyes — larger than her old ones, and set differently in her face, and better at tracking movement in low light, which she filed away for later — and looked at the stranger. He was young and road-worn, his clothes the color of long travel, leather gloves scratched to softness, hair doing whatever it wanted. He had moved without sound, without announcement, without any of the warning a person that size ought to give before doing something that decisive. She had not heard him come in. She had not seen him in her peripheral vision. He had simply appeared, in the way that certain very useful things appear exactly when you have run out of alternatives. She made a sound that was meant to be thank you and came out as a reedy, woody chirp, and then she ran past him to her grandfather. He was already straightening, one hand braced against the wall, the other pressing flat to his sternum in the considering way he had when he was taking inventory of himself. She grabbed his sleeve with fingers that were not quite fingers anymore and pulled herself up to his height — she had lost several inches to the transformation, which she was also filing away, this time with considerably more feeling — and looked at his face. "I'm all right," he said, which was what he always said, and she looked at the mark on his throat where the blade had pressed and decided to believe him the way she always did: mostly, with reservations. She looked back at the stranger. She spread her not-quite-hands in what she hoped translated across species as I don't know who you are but I am extremely glad you exist. Then she reached up and took hold of the mask's edge and pulled. It did not move. She pulled harder. The mask fit her face the way her face fit her skull — flush, continuous, not a seam she could find with her fingertips. She got her fingers under the rim at the temple and tugged until her eyes watered and the mask stayed precisely where it was, and then she made a sound that had more feeling in it than any word she knew and turned to her grandfather with what she suspected was a very expressive expression, given that her face was currently a mask. He was already looking at her with the expression she least wanted to see on him, the one that preceded difficult explanations. He knelt to her new height. "The mask requires a song," he said, quietly, in the voice he used for things that were true and unwelcome. "A particular song, played on a particular instrument. Without it—" He touched the edge of the mask gently, confirming what she already knew. "It will come off when it's ready. Not before." She stared at him. He met her stare with the steady patience of someone who has delivered worse news to worse situations. She turned away before either of them could dwell on it further and looked at the room. The four men were on the floor — three from her bubbles and the spin, one from the stranger's intervention — all of them breathing, none of them moving. She walked to the nearest one and looked at the Link mask on his face, the flat heroic calm of it, and something about the way it sat nagged at her. She had handled enough masks to know how they rested against a face. This one rested wrong. Or rather, it rested too right. Too flush. She reached down and took hold of the mask's edge. It did not lift away. She looked at her grandfather. "Grandfather," she said, which came out as a series of notes, and then remembered, and looked at the stranger, who she had no way to communicate with directly at the moment, and tried to convey with her posture and a pointed gesture what she was asking: help me with this. He leaned down and tried himself and arrived at the same conclusion she had. The mask was not on the man's face. The mask was the man's face, or had become it, fused at every edge, the painted wood continuous with skin in a way that had no clean boundary, that looked like something that had happened slowly rather than all at once. As if it had been growing there. Her grandfather made a sound she had never heard him make before. She looked up. He was kneeling beside her now, and his face had gone somewhere very controlled and still, the way it went when he was thinking faster than he was willing to show. He took the man's wrist. He turned it over. He looked for a long moment at the inside of the forearm. "Come and see," he said to the room. There was a brand there. Not a scar, not ink — a brand, clean-edged and deliberate, in the shape of a symbol she didn't know: three Z's, nested inside each other like a set of closing eyes, each one smaller than the last, each one curled into the curve of the next. She looked at the next man's wrist, and the next. All four. The same symbol, the same placement, the same quality of intention behind it. The stranger was looking too. She turned to her grandfather. "Dreamers," he said, and the word sat in the ruined shop like an object placed on a table. He stood slowly, and looked at the branded wrists, and then at the fused masks, and his expression had stopped being controlled and become something sadder and more specific. "They call themselves that. A cult — the word is inadequate — who believe that this world is not real. That we are all of us a dream, playing out in the mind of a dying boy." He paused. "The Hero of Time. They believe he is dying somewhere, and that Termina is the dream his mind is making as it goes out. They believe that when he finally dies—" His hands folded in front of him. "—we will go with him. And that this is as it should be. That waking is the only mercy left." She looked at the fused masks. At the brands. "They have been doing this to themselves for some time," he said. "Long enough, it seems, to find the passage." She looked at him. "They came through the sewage tunnels," he said. "Beneath the Tower. The Clock Wards have controlled the underground access since Mayor Bremor took office — the main entrance is through the Ward compound itself." He looked at the back of the shop, at the door that led to the passage, and his voice stayed careful and level in the way that meant he was deciding how worried to be. "Which means either the Dreamers have found another way in, or someone let them use the one that exists." The bell above the front door rang, jostled by the chaos still churning through the plaza outside. No one had come through it. Then, from the passage behind the false shelf — the one she had used not twenty minutes ago as a child, what felt like a long time ago now — came a voice. And then another. Low, unhurried, the specific quiet of people who do not think they need to be careful. More than two. Possibly more than four. She looked at the stranger. He looked at her. Somewhere under the Clock Tower, footsteps were getting closer. Rude to ninja the GM who spent his break polishing / readapting RP

This of course also assumes the would be go-getter never dies too, on top of winning every bid + every player receiving a PM every day. Also another factor to consider is how the max number of unique players depends on how many are alive, so 16 per cycle isn't possible anyway. D1-X 16, D2-X 14, D3-X 12 = 42 per loop (max)