Arraenae

Nicki burst into the shop, eager to test out what new metals she could burn. Rin might not like it, but he couldn’t control what Nicki did with the metals if she paid. And if he tried to stop her… well. He had no chance of overpowering her. Nicki almost gagged at the smell. The sickly-sweet odor of a corpse filled the room, wafting up Nicki’s nostrils. How was Rin able to stand this? Had he completely forgotten how to ventilate his shop? She turned around. A shelf full of metal vials greeted her, ready to be consumed. Finally! Nicki charged towards it, ready to try them all. Her foot hit something. She flared pewter and threw her arms out to soften her landing. She rolled to absorb the impact -- right onto something rock-like. Nicki grunted. She looked down and Rin's dead body. A bloody hole marred his forehead, and his eyes stared accusingly at Nicki. She scrambled to her feet. By the Lord Ruler, what -- how -- how was Rin dead? He’d been alive when he’d told everybody about Pikker’s body! Rin might have been a betrayer, but he had been a helpful one. In the beginning, he’d given Nicki pewter and food. He’d helped wash Pikker’s body. And now Rin was dead. For the second time that week, Nicki staggered out of Rin’s metal shop to vomit outside.

Elims never defend elims, huh Nyali? What an utter load of crem that was. I wonder if she was the one with Tin in the beginning.

That could also help, but it wouldn't confirm Arinian. It's possible that if he was Spiked, he would decide that the trust that he got from bussing a teammate would be worth the loss of said teammate. Aman did that in LG17. It backfired on him, but the fact is that he still did it. EDIT: Nicki’s eyes fluttered open. What… what had happened? Where was she? She looked around, but only saw rooftops floating on a bed of pink mist. The sun was almost up. She reached out to touch a curl of mist, but it shied away from her. Nicki’s arm flopped back onto the ground. Nicki groaned and sat up. Her chest throbbed. She looked down and saw a few inches of gleaming spike protruding from her chest. Right. So she was still alive. Nicki gingerly felt at her chest and hissed in pain when a finger brushed the skin around the spike. Somehow, it hurt even through her pewter. Nicki caught sight of a silhouette standing near her. The Terrisman! She kicked at its legs and it grunted. She took advantage of the pause to scramble to her feet. Nicki punched the figure in the face. Then she grabbed its shoulder and brought its torso down onto her knees. It shrieked in pain. Nicki turned and shoved down onto its neck until it hit the ground. She pinned its arms and leaned over towards its ear. “Take your book back,” she said. “Tell your master that he’s not getting my spike. If he wants to try, I’ll just have to kill whoever he sends.” Nicki stood up and stomped on the figure’s arm, which gave a satisfactory crunch under her boot. Let that be a lesson to the Terrisman. Nicki retrieved her clothes and put them on. They were a little tight around the spike, so she yanked down on the neckline. Then she ran off the edge of the roof and hit the ground running. She needed to find Rin again, so she could test out what metals she could burn now. Sorry Len. Cassius was an admirable citizen who got in the wrong place at the wrong time. Hero, does Herwynbe have Feruchemy? I'd be interested to see how a fight went between him and Nicki.

Arinian, can you give us the Nights that you scanned people, as well as reasoning for why you wanted to scan those people on those Nights? Also, no roles, please. For now, I will tentatively assume that you are a village Seeker with accurate scans, but I think you should be killed a few Cycles from now. Nothing against you, personally, but if you're village it'll show that your list can be trusted. Wonko. Hero, by D3 I was sick of trying to lynch Dalinar. So I tried to move onto another topic, Lopen, and then spewed out that thing about Dalinar. It probably didn't help that I was typing that around around my brunch/lunch break, and didn't have much time to proofread. I know that's not really a proper defense. What I did was inexcusable. I got impatient, didn't think ahead, and typed out the first thing that popped into my head without filtering it to see if it actually made sense. (In general, bad things happen when people make posts like that. Just look at the Twitter feeds of certain people in powerful government positions if you want an example.) I was a shortsighted and bad villager. Next time, I'll try to look over my posts and avoid typing when I only have five minutes to say something. Unfortunately, I can't untype something, so there's nothing I can do but hope that I won't do it again. Headshot was up for the lynch D1, almost tied with Dalinar yesterday. However, Ecth was lynched instead. After vote manipulation, the tally was: Ecthelion (4)- Straw, Dalinar, Madagascar, Doc12 Dalinar (3)- Elenion, Arraenae, Ecthelion Hemalurgic Headshot (2)- Seonid, Gamma Fiend I find it interesting that Madagascar was asked to tie the vote with Ecth instead of Headshot. Madagascar, what time did Dalinar ask to have the vote tied with Ecth? Can you also give us your timezone so we know how far from rollover it was? Thanks. Plus, Doc voted on Headshot D3. This isn't proof that Headshot is an eliminator, but it's something worth noting. The Spiked might not have wanted Dalinar to push suspicion of Headshot. Finally, Headshot has been voting a lot with little explanation. D1, he voted on nobody. D2, he voted on Seonid and Manukos. Most importantly, on D3 he voted on Lopen. This could be the act of a teammate wanting to ride a bandwagon to save Dalinar. I know that Wonko and Joe retracted their votes from Headshot D1 because they didn't want to lynch a first time player on the first Day. However, it's not Headshot's first Day anymore. We shouldn't give new players a free pass from the lynch mid-game just because they're new -- it's unfair to both them and us. Besides, I wouldn't put it past Meta to make a complete newbie an elim.

To everybody who wants to lynch me today: Out of all the people who advocated for something other than lynching Dalinar, why am I the most worthy of death? Len, Stink, Jondesu, Wyrm, and Wilson also said that they didn't think lynching Dalinar was a good idea. Stink was very vocal about not wasting another lynch on Dalinar. Why am I the most suspicious? Because I voted on someone other than Dalinar? Multiple other people did that, too. Elenion, A Joe in the Bush, Manukos, and Headshot also voted on Lopen. Headshot in particular is notable because of his erratic behavior. Or perhaps because I survived? Having pewter isn't alignment indicative at all. If anybody here wants to make a case on alignment based off of roles, please see what happened in the last AG. (The village thought that the excessive number of Smokers was because there was a Seeker. They decided to lynch every single Smoker until they caught an elim. Guess what happened? There were around eight village Smokers, to protect against the absurd amounts of elim vote manipulation.) You probably will not outthink Meta the Troll-Distributor. Any attempts are more likely to bring you pain and frustration. Am I the most suspicious because I was the loudest in defending Dalinar? Geez, imagine how I would have even gotten that post past my teammates if I was Spiked. "Hey y'all, I'm gonna vote on Lopen and tell the village that they're gonna lose the game if Dalinar is lynched today. That totally won't bring heaps of suspicion on my head once they find that Dalinar is an elim. Good idea, yeah? I definitely wanna be the next to go after Dalinar. Yep, I'm gonna take that big fat NOPE you typed in the doc as a stamp of approval. Wish me luck!" I'm voting on Wonko. He's been quiet and according to Madagascar he went had suspicious vote coordination with Dalinar. (Dalinar denied it, but I'm not trusting the word of a Spiked.) Finally, I doubt the attack on Madagascar was a WGG. It may have been a village Coinshot attack, it may have been the Spiked attacked, but I can't see the Spiked deliberately wasting another kill after Wilson and Jondesu were also hit and protected.

This definitely sounds like a good opportunity to read that defense then, huh? Take some time to look back at the past cycle and reflect.

Nicki paced on a rooftop, quietly seething. Rin had betrayed her. Rin! She’d thought he was a friend! He’d had no right to tell the rest of the town what she was doing with Pikker’s body. And that Ryth, the one who had threatened to call the guards -- he was the worst of them all. Nicki clenched her fists. That spike was hers. They had no right to say that she had to relinquish it. She’d gotten to it first, before they had even stopped gawking over the dead body. The man the spike had come from was dead, so why did they care about what happened to the object that had killed him? It wasn’t like they were trying to save their fathers from being an Inquisitor. Nicki felt for her pockets and breathed a sigh of relief when she felt both the spike and the booklet. At least she still had both of those. Why was the Terrisman so desperate to have the spike? Didn’t he see that Nicki couldn’t afford to trade away a lead for something that might have been faked? Nicki took out the little booklet. She still needed to read through it to see what it said. She inspected it. The leather cover was cracked, and little flakes fell off when Nicki opened it. She flipped through the pages, which were yellowed and dog-eared. Nicki held it up to the light of the moon and began to read. Some time later, Nicki reached the end of the book. That was it? She flipped through the pages again, but found nothing new. The booklet had no more to say. According to the little book, the trauma of having spikes shoved through one’s body caused a person to Snap. Spikes that were prepared a certain way, when placed in some body parts, could bestow Allomancy and something called Feruchemy. Even if someone had already Snapped, the spikes could cause someone to Snap again. Multiple spikes let someone have multiple powers. The book answered the mystery of how Nicki’s father had Snapped into a Mistborn after already being a Seeker, but not much else. It didn’t explain why Nicki’s father was serving the Steel Ministry as an Inquisitor, or how the spikes that caused people to Snap were prepared. Still, the booklet seemed legitimate. Nicki had to test it out to see if it would work. Nicki took out the spike she’d found at the man’s dead body. It glinted silvery in the light, with a point sharp enough to draw blood. At the time, Nicki had assumed that it was the murder weapon. What if it actually had made him Snap into a Misting like the book had described? There was only one way to find out. Nicki shut her eyes and tried to remember which body part the man had pulled the spike out of. It had been stuck through somewhere around his torso… his heart. The spike had been stuck through his heart. Off went Nicki's shirt and undergarments. She didn't want to get an infection from a bit of cloth stuck in her. She ripped off the sleeves -- she could use them as bandages to staunch the bleeding. Nicki sat down on the rooftop. She felt around her chest for her heartbeat and pressed the tip of the spike over it. Then she took a breath and burned pewter. This was it. The moment where she saw if the Terrisman's book was truthful or not. Nicki shoved the spike in. It slid into her flesh painlessly. The spike hit something hard -- probably a rib. Nicki kept pushing on the spike, and the rib cracked. Searing pain flashed through Nicki, like she’d been set on fire. Nicki screamed. She hunched over and clutched her chest. By the Lord Ruler, the spike burned. She hadn’t felt pain like this in years. Nicki flared pewter, and the pain died down by an infinitesimally small amount. Lord Ruler... it hurt... Nicki's throat went raw from screaming. Rusts, even pewter was failing her now... Nicki’s screams died down into a choked sob. She fell onto her side and curled up into a ball. This… this had been a mistake. The book must be wrong. Nicki blacked out. Note: This is not a confession. Nicki might be Spiked now, but that doesn't mean I'm an elim. Also, Hero, sorry for not giving you either the spike or the booklet. Nicki had to see it for herself.

I've tried my best to be ridiculously active this game in order to draw out a Spiked attack on me. That's why I've been posting so much during the nights and making my new style of analysis so visible to everybody. I'm kind of miffed that people decided to lynch me instead. (Of course, I'm even more miffed at myself, because I thought I was finally getting good at this game. Turns out those suspicious tendencies are still as strong as ever.)

Uh, Ecth and Straw were village not-Mistborns. Lopen was a Lurcher. So there are confirmed village Mistings in this game.

To the people who are voting on me for saying we shouldn’t lynch Dalinar on D3: Multiple people have defended Dalinar or said that we shouldn’t lynch them. I was one of them. Here is a list of the others: Len, Stink, Jondesu, Wyrm, and Wilson. If I am suspicious for defending Dalinar, they must also be suspicious too. I may have been the most attention-grabbing, but I am certainly not the only one who said we shouldn’t lynch Dalinar. I wonder why nobody has voted on any of them yet (EDIT: so there's one vote on Jondesu. One vote, compared to eight on me.) So, Nyali, Silverblade, Doc, Assassin, Herowannabe, Magestar, Sart, and others who are voting/planning to vote on me for defending Dalinar, here’s your list of people to gun for. Gotta kill everybody who advocated for anything other than a D3 Dalinar lynch, even frustrated villagers who weren’t thinking clearly, eh? Some of you say that having Pewter isn’t a good reason to not lynch me. Of course it isn’t. I’m just giving you all a heads up so you don’t panic tomorrow when I’m not dead. The Terrisman continued to stare at Nicki, as docile as ever. Was he just going to stand there and wait? “I’ll read through this tonight,” Nicki said. “If I think it’s legitamite, you’ll have your spike by morning.”

Yeah, I actually get more suspicion for my mistakes when I'm a villager than when I'm an elim. QF12, the the elim team bussed me. LG17, the elim team planned to buss me and then Aman outed me while drunk. LG21, a combination of secret role shenanigans and GM errors outed me. As an elim, I've never been caught by a villager for making a mistake. I've been lynched several times while village, though. I'm very good at being a suspicious villager. In fact, I feel that it's easier for me to be a suspicious villager than a suspicious eliminator. Also, I think the Coinshot might be Spiked. We have so much village protection -- Lopen as a lurcher, my Thuggishness, potentially the Lurcher who protected Wilson, potentially Jondesu as a Thug. All of this village protection is here for a reason.

Alright. I'm a Thug, so lynching me will be of no use. Obviously, I've stormed up in a way that makes me easy to lynch yet again (hello, QF15, MR18), and obviously, some Spiked are probably voting on me to get revenge for Dalinar. Please don't give the Spiked the revenge they want. Spiked, if you really want me dead, you should consider double-tapping me tonight instead of lynching me. Hero, if your vote on me is purely for RP, I'd suggest that you take it off. I can respond in RP, but I will be gone for the next four hours and would rather not be lynched because I decided that sports practice and a mountainload of homework takes priority over an internet game. I will respond by either the end of this cycle or the beginning of N5. Wonko. Nyali.

"I'll read through this and then give you the spike," Nicki said. "I'm not handing over a clue for something you could have made up on the spot." Nicki stared defiantly at the Terrisman. Let him try to take the book and spike from her. She'd give him a beating to remember. You say that in your experience, the first rule for elims is always "never defend another eliminator." Yet you're suspicious of me... because I defended an eliminator. I presume that the reason why elims don't defend each other is to avoid attracting suspicion, yes? Yet I made my defense of Dalinar really, really obvious. I even bolded the last part, which said something along the lines of "Don't lynch Dalinar if you want the village to win." That's not a subtle defense at all. The only way for me to attract more attention would be to put the entire thing in orange, animated glittertext and doublepost it every other page. Yesterday I violated your first rule for elims in both the word of the rule and the spirit of it. I'd like to think that if was an eliminator, I'd be intelligent enough not to defend Dalinar so openly. Yeah. Eh. I get really, really dramatic sometimes with my posts. This is a really bad habit that usually leads to exaggerations. And yes, in hindsight it doesn't seem like such a great idea. I was thinking that the Coinshot can go for other people, and might hit their Lurcher, or other Spiked. This possibility would force the elims to choose between protecting Dalinar and other Spiked. I'm not good at strategy. Usually I avoid it completely. My suggestions might help the Spiked more than they help the village, but what else can I do? Would you just tell me to never try thinking about strategy again? Would you tell me to go home and play with my toys while the real strategists talk? Should I never try my hand at strategy again, because it what I come up might not be optimal? Unfortunately, I'm not that good of a villager. I've made a lot of mistakes this game, which might make me look like an eliminator. I wish this wasn't the case. I'd rather be lynched as an elim for acting suspiciously than be lynched as a villager for making stupid mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes, but I can still still help the village. Please don't lynch me for being a bad villager. EDIT: I'm voting on Wonko because of the suspicious vote coordination/foreknowledge between him and Dalinar that Madagascar brought up D1.

First of all, rusts. Sorry for outing you, Lopen. Second, sorry for not responding to everything you said D1, Nyali. If you've paid attention, you can tell that I normally don't give role suggestions like that. I'll admit, your reponse post was big and intimidating so I kind of put off my reponse indefinitely. Then I found other things to do, like voting on Dalinar, so your post just slipped out of my mind. D3, I said that the village should lynch someone other than Dalinar or lose. I know it looks really bad. This is another one of my bad habits coming back to bite me in the bum. I'm a discovery writer. I can't plan my writing. What I think I'll write and what I actually write usually end up being radically different. This is managable when I have time to look over what I've written and edit it. Combined with my attampts to emulate Aman's argument style, this sometimes leads to me writing really weird things. For example, in LG23, when I was a villager, I wrote something saying that the factions should stop the faction war and focus on the Spiked. I got a lot of suspicion from my own faction for it. All I can say is that it seemed to make sense when I wrote it. I feel like this game is like MR18. I catch an elim early on, but then I doubt my read and try to back out. Then I get heaps of suspicion for it, maybe more than if I'd never caught the elim in the first place. Does this make any sense? I'm not sure. Sometimes I feel like I'm no better of a villager than when I first started playing SE. I'm better at catching elims, but... that's it. My communication skills are still at the level that I bungle what I want to say at least once a game. Analysis to come later, when I'm not on a phone.

D1 Jondesu expressed suspicion of Joe, and voted on El and Wonko. He defended no one. D2, he voted on Hero and was defended by Wilson. D3, after he was attacked, Jondesu expressed suspicion of Len, El, and Stick. He voted on Hero again. Doc, Lopen, Nyali, and Mage said they trusted him. He said he trusted Wilson. Jondesu didn't say very much before he was attacked, so he probably wasn't attacked for talking too much. He does seem like a more random person to attack, but the elims also attacked Kipper. All Kipper did was vote on Gamma D1 without an explanation. Lopen, do you know when Jondesu defended Dalinar? I don't see it anywhere in my notes. If I've missed something, I need to go back and fill it in.

That always sucks.

Alright, done with relationship analysis for C3. (It took one hour and 10 minutes. Seriously, I need to get a life. ) Names are in the same position as last time, so if you can't read a name in the C2 or C3 diagram, just look at the C1 diagram. I'm not spending another twenty minutes to write in names neatly in a dark color. Here's a link for people who can't see signatures.

"Take me to your master first, Terrisman," Nicki said. "Then I've give you the spike." Nicki put the little book inside her satchel. The Terrisman's master might be helpful (for now), but Nicki would be a fool to bow to his initial demands. That wasn't how bargaining worked.

Nicki looked at the Terrisman. Then at the book. Then at the Terrisman again. This had to be it. The answers she was looking for. She snatched the book from the Terrisman's hands and flipped through it. It was full of diagrams and small, cramped writing. "I'll give you the spike after your master tells me everything he knows about Inquisitors," Nicki said. I'll admit it. By D3, I was beginning to doubt my initial read that Dalinar was Spiked. I thought that he wouldn't die, that we were wasting our time, that we wouldn't get any discussion done. I was sick of trying to kill Dalinar and I wanted to move on. I was starting to agree with Stink that attempting to lynch Dalinar yet again was pointless. I have a really bad habit of second-guessing my reads, especially when I have a lot of time to think about them. I doubt myself. At the end of D1, I was already swayed by Dalinar's defense. I thought that I might have just caught a villager who was doing what he misguidedly thought was best. D2, I decided that I should take the chance that Dalinar was lying about having pewter, so I voted on him. Then he survived, which left me annoyed at the complete waste of discussion that D2 was. D3, when Dalinar voted on himself, I was unsure if Dalinar was Spiked or a very unlucky villager. I didn't trust my initial read anymore. I also wanted to talk about someone else. So I voted on Lopen. Throughout D2 and D3, I'd been wrestling with whether to dump out his role inthread or not. If he was a Spiked, well, obviously the Spiked would already know. No harm done to the village. Besides, that was one of the reasons why his confidence about "the Spiked Lurcher" really stuck out to me. If I was really suspicious of Lopen, I might as well go all-out. If Lopen was village, then one more role would be outed. The Spiked might decide to go after Lopen, but Lurchers can protect themselves. He'd live, at least. I knew that there was a chance that I was wrong and that I might have accused, possibly started a lynch on, a villager. (As I said, confidence in my reads is not one of my strong points.) But if I never accuse anybody because I fear catching a villager, I might as well stop playing SE. So, yes, I did argue against lynching Dalinar. That probably was a bad idea, and it's a bad habit. At least I've identified it, so perhaps I'll be able to fix it.

Sure sure. Of course. Yep. Totally nothing. I liked how Dalinar's writeups had a common theme running through them.

Because of Dalinar's alignment, my suspicion of Lopen has lessened considerably. Sorry I outed you as a Lurcher last cycle. Would hunting down another elim make it up for you? We have a list of people (including me) who tried to lynch you instead of Dalinar D3. We can definitely get somewhere with that. I'd also like to note that Operation Relationship Analysis is a success! Tomorrow I'll update my notes, which are linked in my signature. Hopefully they'll be just as helpful in catching other elims as they were in catching Dalinar. Meta, Lopen's vote is entered twice, once on himself and once as a no vote. Is that intentional?

Bugsy. Lopen. I'd still like for Bugsy to talk about his suspicions. Mentions are broken for me, so if someone could mention him for me, that would be great. Just another note -- look at how many people have said things about Lopen! Isn't this discussion amazing? EDIT: By the way, Doc, this is how you create discussion when most people have already decided to lynch someone. You get out and slap a vote on somebody you're suspicious of. I'm suspicious of Lopen. Who are you suspicious of?

Alright. As this game has gone further and further on, I've gotten more suspicious of Lopen. I've had a bad gut read on him since D1, when he voted on Dalinar right after I did. It seemed kind of bandwagony. Lopen started a PM with me in the Night, and we talked in it up until PMs ended. This alleviated some of my bad gut read on Lopen. (But then again I have a tendency to get comfortable around those I excessively talk to. It doesn't mean very much in terms of analysis.) N2, Dalinar was protected by a Lurcher and survived. In our PM, Lopen also claimed Lurcher. Coincidence? With Meta's troll distributions, it could be. Still, D2 Lopen seemed very sure that "the Spiked Lurcher" protected Dalinar. Note the "the". "The" implies that there is only one Spiked Lurcher. If Lopen was the only Spiked Lurcher, he'd know for sure that there was only one, which would make his use of "the" make a lot of sense. (Araris, I know that this is a small semantics thing. I've commented on wording and tone before. I know it's not a solid reason to lynch somebody, but how many lynches in SE where nobody has been hard-cleared has been based on solid, unassailable reasoning?) Is this a stretch? Sure. I'm going off of semantics and a roleclaim and a bad gut read, which really isn't very convincing. But hey, this ridiculous paranoid theory can't be any more of a stretch than the one Lopen had about Kipper. Besides, this one is backed up by more evidence. Additionally, other people seem to have gotten bad reads about Lopen. Something in his posts and actions has to be tipping us all off. I'm willing to bank on a collective bad gut read that Lopen is Spiked. An additional note: I've done visual network analysis of D1 and D2. D1 had a lot of votes/defenses thrown around, mostly centered around Headshot, Lopen, El, Dalinar, Wilson, Nyali, Conquestor, and I. D2's discussion was a lot less spread out. Discussion focused on Dalinar, Lopen, Wyrm, and Hero. Note the decrease in discussion targets. Regardless of if the Spiked wanted to protect a teammate or cause us to collectively tunnel on Dalinar, they've cut down on our discussion. I'm not going to let the elims win by focusing on Dalinar yet again. We have a Coinshot. Let them deal with Dalinar on their own time. (The Spiked probably have more targets to protect than just Dalinar. If we let the Coinshot do their thing, sooner or later the Spiked will have to choose between Dalinar and another Spiked, and Dalinar won't be protected anymore.) Don't waste another lynch on Dalinar if you want the village to win.

Magestar and Araris, I have a very short-term memory, so I don't really remember what you said earlier. Why are you suspicious of me? I'd go back and check, but I have quite a bit of homework I need to get to. Araris, I was the first person to vote on Dalinar. If I hadn't voted on him, it's possible that we wouldn't have sought to lynch him at least two times and possibly even three. I've also attempted to start a discussion on Lopen and Madagascar. I don't know if that's unhelpful, but I definitely have been contributing to this discussion. Magestar, what I meant was that additional discussion about Dalinar today won't help. The only thing that would be more useful is Dalinar's alignment, but I'm not willing to spend a third lynch on that. We have an active Coinshot. Let them pick off Dalinar so we can move on to discussing other people. Unfortunately, my laptop just died on me. I still have some internet access, but it's more limited now, so I'll likely be less active. Hopefully it'll get fixed soon and/or my mom will continue to lend me her laptop.

Honestly, I’m a little suspicious of the people voting on Dalinar. We’ve already spent 2 lynches and 1 Coinshot attack on him. Better to let the coinshot kill him at their own time (so the elims are less likely to have him protected that Night.) Regardless of his alignment, we're not getting much information out of trying to kill him again via the lynch. Bugsy has not said very much about who he is suspicious of. So far, he’s mostly been defending people. The one suspicion he has mentioned was me, which he retracted almost immediately afterwards because he said he misunderstood what I was trying to say. I think Bugsy might be trying to lie low.