Ashbringer

"Good," Cassie replied. She walked over toward the storage room door. Then she hesitated. "Poller, weren't you going to that newsletter meeting?" The boy jumped awake. "Right!" he said, jumping toward the door before sheepishly stopping, looking at the Anarchist. "I can go, right?" "Go ahead," Cassandra laughed. "I can take care of it from here." She watched as Poller ran out the door, then turned to the Anarchist. "I'll be just a moment," she said, then walked through the storage room door and took a left up the stairs. The upstairs of Cassie's shop consisted of several rooms. Her bedroom, along with Poller's and... a guest room, lined one side. Her Soulcasting station and break room lined the other, along with one empty room she wasn't sure what to do with. She moved into the break room, then started clearing off some of the scrap metals from the top of the central table. "This spot should be private. Now, what was it you wanted to show me?" @Sorana

Byron jerked himself awake. He'd apparently never ordered anything, just ran into the tavern and passed out. There were a few people looking at him, one shaking his head sadly. Something still felt... wrong. Very, very wrong. Byron shook his head and ran out the door, not waiting to see if people were looking. He felt like he was being... pulled toward something. It was just a question of whether he would reach it before it ripped him apart.

Not alone. The phrase stirred something within him. Something more than just... frustration. His fingers clenched around his wine glass. Not alone. He gave a low chuckle. He'd never been alone. First everyone on Scadrial, desperately asking and archiving every way his Leeching worked. Roshar, being watched by so many. Cinder, never leaving his side. The Skybreakers never giving him peace. And his Gift. Some part of him knew Cinder was supposed to be his friend. Some other part knew that his Gift was supposed to be... something else. But at this point he didn't care. "I am never alone," he said, refusing to look at the Radiant. @Sorana@bees?

I mean, it wasn't much. But I was iffy on Silber from the alignment scanner proposition, and he'd only made one post. I stab-voted him in order to try and get him to post more, as he successfully played the last two games only posting once per turn, while avoiding major suspicion as an Elim. And then he didn't post any more the next cycle. And then he died.

Hmm. You have to love when your main Elim suspicion gets night killed by the Elims... Gears I have been noticing is being more quiet than usual, but I feel like that can be attributed to this being a Blackout game and there being little for Gears to analyze. Pyro... has been unusually quiet in-thread, and I haven't gotten a PM from him. But he has a valid-ish reason to do so, so I don't know if that's a reason to lynch him. I'm going to see if I can supplement my reads from earlier.

Herald Meme!

Schrodinger seemed to have lost control of the massive cats.

AraRaash opened his eyes. His eyes. It was still an interesting concept to him. For so long, he’d lived only looking through other people’s eyes. It was still him, but the voice and eyes were always from someone else. Even that encounter with the PRE, he was still looking through Faleast’s eyes. Now, their eyes were... something else. Their shared body still looked like Faleast, but there were... differences. He was taller, for one, because he slouched less. He had less wrinkles, less of a limp in his right leg, less trouble getting to sleep at night. Well, physically. Faleast had a habit of getting too... attached to things. People. AraRaash had tried making human friends before, but being immortal meant they would vanish eventually. AraRaash had just decided that for some, “eventually” wasn’t good enough... Enough reminicing. AraRaash rolled out of bed, removing a few of Faleast’s sentimental adjustments, like that limp. He didn’t like limping. It made too much noise and it slowed you down. How are you supposed to sneak around like that? What are you doing, AraRaash? sounded Faleast’s voice. The Shadow seemed to be tired, but not incredibly surprised by being forced “awake”. Trying to finish what you couldn’t start, old man, he replied mentally. He was better at that than Faleast. Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill anyone. Well, that was the plan. AraRaash blurred his features, taking the appearance of a younger man from Roshar he remembered. Someone hopefully nobody would recognize if he did get noticed, somehow. Then he opened the door to his room and crept back toward the work station. It was a mess. Faleast’s entire section had been turned into a crime scene, where thieves had broken in and stolen a good amount of research and police had taped everything off to investigate its connection to Tara Night’s death. Fortunately they hadn’t catalogued the damage yet, which gave him a golden opprotunity to liberate some material. AraRaash found his samples after some searching. Only four were still in the tray, and he counted another six scattered on the floor. Three were still in machines. The three he had changed the phase of were missing. AraRaash scooped up two of the dropped orbs and absorbed them into his arm. This would be easier than he had thought - with no fingerprints or records, everyone would think the invaders took a little more than they actually did. He skipped lightly through the room, careful to disturb nothing, taking a sample here, a fragment there, and storing it within his own body. Work done, he slunk back to his room and went to his bunk, changing back to Faleast’s appearance. He would rest for a while. Then he had some... tests to run.

Schrodinger, having claimed Dominion over cats, cast the spell for them.

“Sure,” Cassie replied with a grin. This is why she loved her job. Although she did have a few other... appointments to make. The Anarchist, the Ghostbloods... well, he’d been waiting longer than the Anarchist in any case. Business first. “I have a room upstairs we can use if you’d like. Right now I just use it as a break room, but it would work well for a meeting-” A thought struck her. She recovered and continued. “-if you’d rather keep it private. Does that work for you?” She half-turned toward the back door toward the upstairs rooms. But not before she got one, sharp look at this customer’s wrists.

Lucky reverted himself and his biplane to normal, then began meowing at the very large birds and maybe-dinosaurs.

Gets... the souls of your enemies? *Inserts snow* Edit: Ninja'd, but... jinx? Double souls?

Schrodinger regained consiousness as they all started falling from the sky. ”AAAAAAAÄAAAAAAAAAAH!” he yelled. Then, from the distance, Lucky the cat appeared flying Schrodinger’s old biplane!

Gets fish trees *Inserts freezer*

“Ten chrysts apiece, so...” he stopped, counting mentally. “About 2 boxings? I can do 3 for 4 boxings if you want,” he said, grabbing some Braize Bars from a jar on his counter. He smiled. “I make them myself.”

Tyrian heard a voice somewhere in the crowd behind him who may or may not have been trying to get his attention. But whoever they were, they would need to do a better job to try and talk to him. So this Althea wanted... to talk. Tyrian was a little confused by that. They had... fought, hadn't they? Falling... The pit. The crevices. The burning in his mind like a siphon of will. And that Dust-cursed Skybreaker. He'd gotten away, hadn't he. He'd forgotten. But this one... she wasn't fighting. Just... directing. Trying to move him, away, yes, but from what? "From what?" he said, only half-conscious of the words on his lips. "I did... what I was paid for. I wanted... out. You... you interfered. The Skybreaker interfered!" he said, voice rising with... Not hate. Not what he'd expected. Frustration? He didn't know what he was feeling. Memories, memories with something not right about them. One final word dripped off his lips. "Broken."

"Of course," Cassie said to the customer. "Were you looking for a decorative vial? I can probably make that for you as well." Meanwhile Poller perked up at the sound of another customer entering the shop. He decided to skip the monologue - he was rather tired. "Sure thing!" he said, speedwalking to the steel rack. "One steel bracelet, that's 15 chrysts, to boxings thats..." Poller hesitated. "5 boxings? About? I'll round it to 5," he said, after seeing Cassie nodding at him. @AmazingGoob

I'm... honestly not sure what I was thinking. Having the scanner use a confirmed villager as a PM-based announcer is a better strategy, at least until we get a confirmation of reliable protection. I'm assuming there's some form of protection (it's more likely than alignment scans), but can they protect the same person every night consistently? That's a big 'if' to risk a scanner on. Then again, we're also risking there being some PM reading role (which is unlikely IMO). So yeah. Scanners, unless something insane happens like finding 3 Elims in a row or a drawback threatens the information, claim to a scanned Villager in PM. As for the Kasimir thing, I was more thinking that self-voting is something that he will do without much incentive. So he could have done it to trigger an ability, but I'd be more confident in that assumption if it was anyone besides Kasimir. (And I was thinking the ability would only apply on a self-vote, which seems far too specific for me to guess.) Either that or Kasimir has future sight and preemptively self-voted in the QF so we'd discount this ability as just Kas being Kas.

You get... locked in a cramped Vending Machine, possibly with Drama and Fadran? *Inserts a tent*

So I was typing up a response to Devotary's post, but I forgot that the game ended at 7 instead of 8 and my brain didn't register that Elkanah closed the cycle until I had finished... Well, I didn't die, so I'll try it now. LG66 also had an alignment scanner. That scanner was Matrim. Who scanned me. And found I was a Kandra. And then got killed before they could tell anyone. I didn't respond because I didn't have time/energy after golf to and thought I had time. I will be honest and say I didn't mean in PMs, but using PMs is probably a much better idea (preferably with someone scanned as a confirmed Village). I'm binge-watching videos of Town of Salem, where the alignment scanner (Sheriff) often has to claim to get any bad guys lynched since there's not effective PMing, and there's a much better guarantee of there being protective roles (who often will also counterattack). There is the downside of the scanner possibly being random killed while protective roles are going off gut reads for attacks, but with no guarantee of protection in this game anonymity is a much better defense. So, on with the night. I'm not entirely sure where the Mist lynch came from besides "not-Illwei", and that seems like a fairly bad role to lose, but without context of other roles it's hard to tell. Vote manip is always interesting, and if it was anyone except Kasimir I'd say someone could change their vote in PM if they voted on themself. I think a traditional vote move/Riot is more in line.

Yeah, it was definitely a good call on your end, even if it didn’t change anything. It’s just a weird decision on my end, as I didn’t/wouldn’t know if you were telling the truth, or if you were a panicking JP desperate to decieve. Plus I have the added incentive to, you know, not be dead

Yeah, or “Illwei claimed KC to somebody” and I just go “ME!” And yeah, I could tell... which is the main reason I did believe it. Although I’m not sure if I would have committed last-minute suicide to keep you alive, but it definitely would have been an interesting next cycle...

I’ll play. And you’ll never guess who I’m RPing as! I assume this is Role Madness, as the original game was, but I do have to ask.

I posted analysis... @The_God_King, can we get a vote count?

I had a lot of fun here as well, even though I managed to get lynched (for the first time) and killed on cycle 2 (for the second time... fingers crossed the pattern breaks for the LG). So a bit of story time: end of cycle 2, lynch is tied between me and @Illwei, and at exactly 12:00 for reset Illwei PMs me claiming the Korathi Cultist and not wanting to die. Unfortunately by the time I read it the cycle had locked and I couldn’t have changed my vote if I had wanted to... which I was somewhat considering. Fortunately, I died () and that made this a very interesting game, and I had some fun being the only one who believed the claim in the dead doc for a while . ... ... *Realization* @Elbereth... did you actually flip a coin for that tie, or did I get sacrificed by the GM to keep the Korathi Cultist alive? In other news, I learned that reading TJ’s alignment or Sart’s intentions are both almost impossible, as all three of us turned out to be Korathi. Go figure.