Fifth Scholar

Agree there’s probably an Elim on now. Disagree there’s necessarily one up for Exe. We saw what happened D2 in the MR >>

Yeah I should back off the chaos but in my defence this is what happens when I leave myself no time for actual analysis >> Hael Parking on Aman. It’s still a suspicion even if it’s gut and it won’t go anywhere. If Nerdy gets killed that’s fine, but I won’t join because I didn’t analyse it enough to feel comfortable doing so.

IDK man I showed up fifteen minutes late with Starbucks and I just want to salvage some EoD reads from this otherwise completely wasted cycle on my part Would actually maybe switch to TUN for this actually no how about Hael

Aman it is then (Xino) Sounds legit I buy it. @_Stick_ you wanna switch your vote? edit: Gotta keep up that bussing rep

I will say this is the second cycle in a row where I don’t like the Exe. Very much my fault this time around for not being in the loop for most of the cycle but still do we want to make a last minute push onto Hael or Aman or TuN I might be willing

No. I have actively avoided thinking about the IC at all really meditate: bookmarking this Bookwyrm quote Seems brazen given his own voting history and the like

Alright no actually. Silvereye. I’m gonna return to the donut. Xino credit to @Kasimir obviously

Okay that was a very fast-and-dirty reread so I apologise if none of the following makes sense but I need to throw myself into discussion Kas is probably village. My paranoia on active thread-talkative players is shifting to Aman but no way in the ten Braizes am I gonna try and build that shrek case in under an hour off of pure gut so I got nothing there. Read of Mat has mildly improved from yesterday but still not looking good. He’s probably about where Hael is. Wonder if I’m just holding grudges over from the MR at this point, or if I’m actually picking up on similar suspicions. It would be funny if Szeth just reconstructed the Sith team. >> It would also be funny if this was an AG2 repeat and there are no hyperactive/experienced Elims. By funny, I mean depressingly chaotic >> There’s been a lot of discussion on Devo’s vote on me last cycle and it’s gratifying to see that everyone else was as confused as me by it. I see such a vote as much more in line with a hurried!Devo than either v!Devo or e!Devo and don’t necessarily see it as AI—her normal elim playstyle would avoid this entirely, but given that it is such a radical break from it, I am not discounting the possibility that it was somewhat deliberate. From my interactions with her last cycle, though, I have my gun-held-to-temple impression of her as still village. Most of the six pages did not stick with me so I am not equipped to comment on as much as I should from this cycle specifically. Finding the early Xino train weird but also the fact that it’s no longer leading makes me almost want to hop onto it. He’s said even less than me, though, so it’s not exactly a quality Exe. Stick on the other hand has said a lot. She feels Village on balance but this is vibe analysis and nothing specific so right now it’s more “not worth killing” than “has actively done something meriting real trust” Almond and Insanity I need to look at again. They went completely under my radar. Wizard seems different than in the MR when he was evil—more assertive on things, a bit more talkative as well, so I’m hesitantly marking him as village. The Silver/Nerdy debate is not something I understand terribly deeply because I was absent for a good chunk of it but Nerdy gets points from me for actually showing up so I will give Silvereye a two-vote lead for the present as I continue to try to do actual analysis on something. Sorry again. Could have done a lot better by posting before the cycle was about to close >>

Today has been crazy I am so sorry will read through and vote. Will try to multiquote but ughhh six pages

Huh? I am literally still on Mat with zero intention of moving to Dannex in particular. I just don’t see why people want Kas dead now.

So I know Kas is somewhat choosing to seal his own fate atm and that will probably change and I am not terribly secure in his village-ness myself but why exactly do we have three votes on him? Y’all really gonna make me do real analysis huh >>

I seek to both appear and be helpful More seriously, you raise a good point I hadn’t considered with this—namely, the difficulty of exporting the analysis casually into the thread. It’s possible if an IC member wants to do so before falling to the Exe, but otherwise it’d be tough. Likely not as good as I’d hoped, then, even though you could still try. More random thoughts: Aman feels like v!Aman. Still OK with my Mat vote, though his explanation is noted. If Hael stays null for people, we should probably start looking into him (cf. the recent MR). If Kas is village and we’re getting sidetracked on each other, I am going to be annoyed. Dannex’s wagon doesn’t have a ton of traction, but it’s interesting that none of the counterwagons have any traction at all.

Yes. At the very least, the IC is still a confirmed village group. If they ever outnumber the rest of the game, they can just claim to each other and win. The Elims can’t kill them quickly enough before they have shrekked all the people who aren’t them. Obviously, talking too much can be a problem—unless you are good at masking your speech patterns and time zone, you can still get caught out by linguistic analysis—but at the very least they should all check in every cycle to confirm numbers, and, if they ever outnumber everyone else, be prepared to mass-claim and sweep. Also, this is a confirmed village group, so analysis can be done within it relatively freely/untaintedly, which is another boon. It’s not completely open season like, say, the Jedi doc, but aside from a few misdirections to preserve identity security and such, you could have good serious conversations in there which don’t have elim analysis seeping in. That said, again, be cautious, and refer back to my earlier point about people getting caught out with linguistic analysis.

I don’t want to vote on you though. Somewhat because you’re fun to have around, somewhat because you’re talkative and we thus get to mine more information by killing you later, partly because I don’t have real suspicion for you beyond paranoia, which I’ve noted. If you’re going to take my paranoia away from me, you can do that, but you also take away my main vote incentives. Mat was a better early target—to counter your point, if you flip village, it doesn’t answer for whether Mat’s claim is well-intentioned. It’s the more suspicious/notable action, so I started there. Not sure what your problem is with that. I can multitask with my suspicions. I tend to do that a lot anyways Yeah I get Sunday busy-ness. :/ Alright if there’s something better out there, go find it You’re an analysis-y OG person; surely something has stricken your interest. So far the thread has been, as I’ve already noted, discussion of stuff that I either don’t have opinions on, or don’t have the ability to have opinions on. This is a bit different. If you expected your claim to do this, congrats, it worked. Enjoy your free suspicion. If you have other targets in mind, I’m happy to hear them.

Is it a streak if it lasts only one game? And she has a hedge. Doesn’t mean she is the hedge. Yet. But we’ll see how often she hides in it. Uninteresting, kind of—the Elim count speculation is genuinely uninteresting in the sense that I actually am not curious on speculating into the distro armed with zero information, and don’t expect it to lead anywhere productive. The meta discussion on TUN and Dannex is perhaps more fruitful, but I can’t participate very fully because I have no way of looking into it without using my SE time catching up on games that aren’t this one, which isn’t a good use of it for me. Might be for you, since you have grounding in those games, but I’m going solely off what I see in thread and what I can dig up from the past in less than a couple minutes. You can call this low effort and you’d probably be right, but it’s a QF and I’m not apologising. A v!Devo read always entails paranoia, but I do stand by this one >> It is not. It is a vote for Matrim in this specific instance, and is somewhat an extension of my unease towards you—namely, that you were defending his claim on his behalf. I would like to hear his own justification for what he was hoping to get from it, as the move, while fun, is also potentially distracting.

Wouldn’t you like to know Greetings, @JNV! You have woken me from hibernation but I do not mind I am currently in a state where I do not have real time to want to care about the meta arguments being made, don’t really have the experience to make or respond to them anyway because I’ve been out of the loop, and don’t really care about the discussion around size of elim teams/IC because knowing or not knowing it doesn’t really change our objectives. Gotta shrek Elims, gotta not shrek villagers. Mind games are up to the people in the doc to wrangle. I am writing off pretty much all of that discussion as NAI, with possible exceptions for TUN who I distrust. I also don’t trust Kas as much as I’d expect to at this point, but I’m not gonna hold that against him till later because the World Cup focus may be confounding his usual village presence. Devo seems village again, which scares me as much as it did in the MR >> in interest of starting a new Discourse I am interested in shrekking Matrim today

MESSSSSSIIIIII MESSI MESSI MESSI Wait we’re only a quarter of the way through? Thought it ended at midnight/every 24 hours.

This really is a QF, with how fast things move, huh. No rest for the wicked who try to get to sleep before midnight. Probably fair though @Kasimir what is A:tR @_Stick_ good to have another chance to play alongside you how’s the new hedge coming along? You seem to have built it quite high already, hopefully you remember to trim it so the branches don’t get in the road

I literally never play QFs …could make an exception though. Sign me up as Ëarendil, brightest of mariners. He a little confused (has not read Skyward), but he got the spirit

We are all @A Joe in the Bush I am also glad we decided against this because I think my Shining guilt would have doubled in the event of me having to kill a v!Alv in a duel. >>

You win most perceptive Elim, definitely. Good work ferreting out the gambit, even if you didn’t act on it. Mind elaborating why you were thinking Mads over Joe? Drake and I kinda just assumed we were linked with an iron chain and super obvious partners but clearly y’all thought otherwise Not that killing innocent villagers is fun, but I almost wonder if we should’ve redirected Mat to someone else so I could have dueled you. That would have been a *blast* to RP. Force Pushing getting restricted to every other cycle makes sense. I don’t think removing the restriction on Force Lightning does. It’s too powerful if the Sith have consistent double-access to it, particularly if another cultist is already using the kill. We would have been screwed in any endgame if the Sith had repeatable Force Lightning (doubly so if both were still alive). Lightning also has the wonderful advantage of doubling as vote manip, and being unblockable. That the Sith got unlucky with how they coordinated its use does not negate its undeniable effectiveness. Yeah, Alv was clutch. Also I’m gonna blame Drake for that tunnel, sorry Drake. I’ll accept responsibility for Shining Tbf, as I said, by the end of the cycle you had pretty much changed my mind. I just didn’t see a way back. >> So sorry about that. You nailed Ash at least with your analysis, which we probably would have heeded more if we hadn’t, uh, “cleared” him C1. Thanks for taking the misexe like a champ, it’s never fun, but you handled it well >> Thank you! The duel was too much fun. You played a good Elim game in the sense that you stayed low to the ground enough that Drake and I never suspected you enough to actually want you dead, until there just weren’t enough options left. Sorry for messing up your lightsaber mechanics—it’s difficult trying to match up mental pictures sometimes. In the future do feel free to correct me on what’s going on, your character should be yours See, there was no advantage to me challenging anyone, unless you were EVIL! Yeah we screwed that up >> Basically, Drake and I’s thinking was, at the end of C5: you/DR!Mat/cultist!Turtle are on a team (can reverse who the DR is or add a Cultist!Ash, if you want). You also have access to Force Lightning because why wouldn’t you, so I’m probably getting roleblocked, and if Drake isn’t right with his redirect, he’s getting killed because we were so closely tied. We also have a chance of dying to elim hammer. The following day, I can do no better than draw if I don’t duel, because even if I rally the village into killing the remaining DR, and I choose correctly, my getting killed was inevitable. The duel was a way of protecting me for a cycle against incoming actions, getting a chance to do in the DR, and most importantly not die. Obviously, you weren’t evil, so this was largely irrelevant, but if you were evil, this was the only way we’d win. You have no idea how enormous our relief was when Drake didn’t die yesterday and no one got hit by Lightning. We were also just baffled. Still stuck to the paranoia on you though which was an Oof. We’ll get on that statue right away. Final remarks - thanks are most obviously due to Kas for running the game and putting up with me and Drake. @DrakeMarshall was the best Jedi partner I could have asked for, and his gut was unfailing on non-Alv personages. I have gained a greater appreciation for gizka. @Devotary of Spontaneity was a readable villager, making me almost die of shock, and @Madagascar was both readable and a ton of fun. (Should use this as an opportunity to thank all the RPers.) Sorry to everyone I misshrekked, thanks to the Elims for putting up a very good fight, and congrats to Devo and @Ookla the Tall for breaking the anagrams. The final eight unscrambled to “Dr Dacken,” though it did indeed fortuitously contain “Drake” inside it.

It’s been good fun, Wizard. Thanks. May the best duelist win.

The Sith was flying towards him, the acrobatic, aggressive stance he was assuming threatening to overwhelm his last defences. Hamartano felt his weariness in his bones. The Force sustained concentration, attunement for the fight, but the physical strength to sustain himself was still being drawn from his body, which tired like any other man’s despite his relative fitness. The blood still seeping from his elbow didn’t help either. He went on the defensive, emphasising the arcing forms of Niman and warding away the red blade which flew in from all directions, trying to maintain distance in the open plain. Nonetheless, he knew it was the final act for both of them. The Sith warrior was weakening as well—anger and rage animated him, but his strikes were less precise than they had been, and Ataru, as Hamartano knew from his own experience, was the most physically demanding of the forms. One of them would drop soon. It was time for a last trick. He assumed, as he had done only once before, the First Form—Shii-Cho, a rudimentary art which most masters did not even bother to teach. Wizard’s blend of Ataru and Juyo flew at him. The boxlike style of Form I’s fighting sustained him for a space of time, but it lacked the refinement of VI. The scarlet saber flashed inside his guard, being only barely turned away. A powerful overhand blow bounced off a block thrown up only just in time, and a chunk of Hamartano’s flowing locks were singed instantly as the blade skimmed past his head. A third blow crushed him to his knees, and even as Hamartano set down his saber and pushed himself up, he could see the triumph in his enemy’s eyes as his blade reared back to strike again. It came forward, and Hamartano moved with the last of his energy. Throwing up his right hand, he Pushed with all his might, holding it inches from the incoming saber. With his less dominant left, he swept up his weapon from the sand and slashed it in an arc, directly at the side he had struck before.

Never get caught in a bind. The words of one of his first instructors in lightsaber combat. And if you do get caught in a bind, be the first to leave it. Wise words, indeed, Hamartano thought wryly, as he pushed with all his might back against the lightning-coated blade of his foe. His fingers were red and blistering from the proximity to the lightning, and Wizard’s looked to be faring little better, but the Sith still pressed against him, intent on shoving him down. Sometimes, despite the advice of mentors, you got situations you couldn’t avoid. Hamartano would have to work out of this gradually. Locking his jaw, he sidestepped, letting his blade begin to slide down Wizard’s even as less direct force stopped its forward movement. Then, he threw himself to the side and released his blade from the lock completely, sidling it down towards his enemy’s fingers. The doubly-red blade shaved by his right ear as he completed the disengagement, and Hamartano regrouped, flowing into the neutral Form Six. Balanced, hopeful, the choice of the diplomats—almost nothing that Hamartano actually was. Yet sometimes the unnatural choices worked the best. It conformed you to them, rather than the other way around. When facing something as unpredictable as Juyo, the balanced forms held their merit. He seemed to flow for a while more than fight, attack to defence, defence to attack, parry and riposte. Though the fight was still chaos, Hamartano felt the peace which had eluded him before begin to seep into him. It was never something Niman had given him; in training, he had always found it the driest and most boring of the forms. Yet there was something to the way it made you hold yourself, made you be open to the Force, made you use the Force in your own way rather than falling into circumscribed attacks, which appealed to the marksman in Hamartano. Any man could train to hit a still target at amazing range. What set you apart as a shooter was hitting the bodies that moved in combat, nailing the small elusive beings who seemed to flit between ground rather than cover it. The Force flowed into him—perhaps he flowed into the Force?—and he maintained his newfound rhythm. Tired though his muscles were, they moved like fingers flying to the right notes on an instrument, a harmony in line with the testimony of the sand beneath his feet and the clear blue sky, which seemed to uphold the promise of Light more than anything else. He wheeled his blade in a circle, catching the crackling red of Wubum and flicking it in a spiral with his wrist, hoping to disarm.

As the choking cloud of dust rolled up from the landscape, Hamartano allowed a wry grin to escape him as Wizard was blocked from his view, his humour breaking the wave of anger which had surged upon the Sith’s slander against his master. Years of riding a swoop bike through this cursed landscape would not be put to waste. His opponent would soon regret throwing up an obstruction which benefitted him more. He squinted into the cloud, his eyes trained for the telltale movements which identified living creatures, even with the hum of his opponent’s lightsaber having faded away. Despite his concentration, he felt, rather than saw, the first bolt to emerge from the cloud. He ducked, and the purple stream arced over his head. The next two were harder to avoid; he blocked with his saber instinctively, but he could not get his guard high enough in time; the second bolt caught his dueling hand, and he doubled over in pain, his good arm writhing in agony even as all feeling vanished from it. The fourth bolt was coming, headed straight for his chest, and Hamartano knew it would be fatal if it connected. Gritting his teeth, he reached deeper within himself, to the wellsprings of frustration and anger and guilt which lay at his core and beat against the peace he sought. He had done this only once before, in solitude, and the resultant mess he had made had caused him to buy a new bike. But here, in the thick of combat, it seemed appropriate. He lifted that cluster of emotions, contemplated it for a moment, and as if throwing it up in a fit of sickness, with an earsplitting yell, hurled it with his mind from his chest, through his mouth, to his free hand, shaking and held up by the arm which still bled freely. The lightning crashed into the hand, but instead of connecting, it went up—magnified tenfold in power, a blazing purple beacon which flickered for an instant and died, its afterimage seared into his retinas. The swirling sandstorm cleared instantly, the dust fleeing from the power of the blast. Hamartano gasped as if he had sprinted the Kessel Run on foot, but wasted no time. Pins and needles sprang up in the arm that had been struck, and as he felt feeling return, he marched steadily towards his opponent, who stood revealed, a crimson bar of death already held at the ready. He said nothing—there were no more words to be said. It was life or death. His blue saber flickered on again, and he resumed the Fourth Form. At one with the whirling winds of the planet, he twisted towards his enemy in a blaze of light, slicing out towards the Sith Lord.