Ashbringer

Yeah I realized how close it was a little late

The only vote manipulation currently available is tied to the Roleblocker mask, right? Hmm.

The sounds of battle had died down, at least enough. Coliver had barely managed to create a bandage around one Gerudo's bloody wrist, but the others around seemed to appreciate the help and plenty were capable of bandaging themselves. She wasn't the only helper around, either. Plenty of people were here for the festival rather than as any guard. Makazi had a rougher time, looking at her hands covered in blood that wasn't hers. Coliver hadn't pressed the story, but she'd been over where the Deku Sprouts were. That hadn't gone well for them. "M... Marton's heading for the first boats," Mak finally stammered. "I want to... I should..." Coliver just gave her a hug. Moonfall, she still couldn't tell her. "Mak, he can take care of himself. You're not a fighter. He..." No. She couldn't tell her, but she couldn't lie either. "... I don't know what he is anymore. Please. If we can't stick together, the three of us, don't get yourself hurt following him." And don't leave me here alone, was what she hoped her eyes conveyed. "I'll think about it," Makazi said, eyes returning to her hands stained red. Some part of Coliver understood. The majority of her was currently rebelling at doing any thinking at all. Action. Motion. Something to prove, something to help, something, something, something that wasn't realizing where she was and what had happened to them all. But she wasn't alone in that. There were others. Someone was carrying around bundles of plants, trying to help a group of too many people. Coliver started staggering her way over towards her. "Hey, do you want some help? I'm out of bandages but I've got an extra set of hands. I'm Coliver, this is..." she turned. Makazi hadn't followed her. In the distance, Marton's body was boarding a boat to head into flame. ( @Doc12 , or anyone else! )

Not randomly, it's based on lowest Rupees. Edit: Well well well

So to put together what I think some people are talking around: We need to exe an Elim in order to win this Loop. If the Elims kill 3 villagers and the Village exes 2 villagers, then it's 7-4 and Elims win, with 5 confirmed villagers. If the Elims don't submit kills and the Village exes 2 villagers, then it's 10-4 and Elims still win, with only 2 confirmed villagers. Meanwhile, especially now that the Elims can only kill 2 villagers, if the Village exes 1 elim successfully it's at worst a 9-3 split, which is still a Village loop win. So the Elim's only real incentive to NK is to try and eliminate pressure off of an exe candidate, which... we didn't do a whole lot of discussion of D1/N1. So they're not killing. Possible they could start, but I somewhat doubt it. That leaves the village options as trying to exe an Elim to win the loop, or just try and out-throw and get two solid confirmed villagers. And honestly that second option sounds... boring. Meant to send this a bit ago but got busy, so I'll send it in now and then look at Wahr, see if their not-flip would tell us much.

Not-Marton had come to them first. "I should go to the perimeter," it said, looking just past Makazi and not at all at Coliver. "I know how to fight, at least against those things. And the splint's helping my arm, really," it lied through its unearned teeth. Makazi, to her credit, agreed with Coliver in many things. "Absolutely not. You need rest. And fight? You mean those scraps at the park to boost your ego? This is different. This is... this is real. You should stay here." "I-" Coliver interrupted. "Mak, maybe it's not as bad an idea. And Marton..." she still wasn't sure what to say. She... she didn't want to break Makazi's heart twice over. "... it's been a long time. He's changed, Mak." "More than you know," Not-Marton said. Moons, it wasn't helping her, was it? Moons. The moon was... she'd only been an infant thirty-three years ago, but she'd heard the stories and they didn't sound good. "I'm going. Take care, Makazi, Coliver," it said, and walked over towards one of the guards. It had gotten a sword. Where had that come from? Coliver yanked her vision away from the dead spirit. No. If that thing could find a way to be helpful, she could to. Surely she remembered some of what Vale had brought up, she'd just gotten an impromptu lesson in wound care. Even with Vale... gone, she could do something. Grabbing a stammering Makazi's arm, she ran over to a boulder that seemed to give some cover. "Is anyone injured? I have c- bandages!"

If I had to guess, about halfway through the night, with a more engaged team (ie one with you/Archer, perhaps Coder) deciding earlier. Depends how much a team not involved in D1's meta-discussion reads into the meta, or how much a team that was involved would want to explain the strategy that actually happened. E!Wonko or E!Archer could just leave the kill up to another member pretty easily. Assuming the kill was actually skipped. I see the value in one team "throwing" the first loop in order to get a better (or worse) picture for the Village in terms of alignments, but it's still a little backwards to me, and what you'd said earlier about the rationale for skipping a kill was somewhat confusing. If the Elims want to throw, they can do so at any time by NKing one of their own, if one isn't caught - obviously that's not ideal for them if it's obvious, but without the alignment-judging abilities of Process of Elimination it becomes easier to not make it so. ... actually... hmm. Perhaps I get the reasoning. Less of a pool, and less early, in the case of a win. Still odd to me. Part of the game with skipping kills in a game with roleblocks is that if you purposefully withold a kill, you 4x your chances of a roleblocker hitting any one Elim and announcing it to the thread, rather than the one Elim actually sending in the kill.

Ngl I’ve been… not that busy? Or more busy with social commitments than work commitments, so haven’t had much free time + computer time line up. But also I think it’s difficult for me to get engaged in the game when nothing too meaningful has happened yet. (Sure, missing/blocked NK is interesting, but not as interesting as an actual target.) Also, I’m an RP guy. Kinda my thing, and I’ve been… somewhat known to prioritize it over early analysis But if there’s something specific someone wants me to take a look at, let me know!

Coliver and Makazi hadn’t said a word to each other since they walked through the South Gate. It was all a blur, really. Marton was… it wasn’t Marton. She had to let go of that. The Goron patriarch, whatever his name was, she never’d asked, had carried it out on his back. It had been trying to explain something to her, then nearly ran outside when the fires began. When Vale… They’d found a spot to sit. Someone had apparently saved some of the cookies she’d made, and they were being passed around. Coliver couldn’t imagine wanting to eat anything right now.

AraRaash still wasn't sure about what this universe was, but it did have good food. He spent most of the early day on bedrest on a large Goron - that was the proper term, he'd hopefully managed to glean - couch in the middle of a relatively-small town, surrounded by his body's former friends attempting to dote on him as well as some young adults with varying expertise could. Coliver was busy baking treats, and avoiding him, but Vale was apparently a training physician and the group of Zora had some innate healing, which helped explain him being mobile by the end of the night. Still a broken leg, but able to join Mazaki in a mini-raid of the kitchen. Something was strange about Mazaki. Not bad-strange, not suspicious-to-hostile-strange like Coliver... Mazaki just had a lot of emotions she was sorting through, AraRaash figured. Normally he was better about getting into people's heads, but most of his expertise was on humans, who were evidently missing from this reality, and Zora were more like Altathians than the human-adjacent Terminians. Whatever the reason, she seemed very eager to organize their little band of old friends. It was night by the time Coliver found him alone. "What have you done?" she asked, shutting the door quietly but with tenseness in her hands. Might as well start by playing dumb, though AraRaash figured it wouldn't last long. "Sorry, Mazaki said you'd be making way too many. Though she also said you'd start with the-" "What. Did. You. Do. To. Marton!" Coliver said, fangs clenched. This race had fangs. Hopefully they weren't used often. "What are you, spirit?" AraRaash looked down at his hands. They looked like he'd be healing for weeks, and for a fall much lower than the one Marton had apparently taken. "You saw, didn't you? Usually I never get to see what it looks like." Coliver said nothing to that. "Really, I didn't see. One minute I was up, the next minute-" Coliver grabbed something metal and nearly lunged at him, some form of scream buried deep within to not register to the others drinking upstairs. "You? Marton fell! He was... he was gone! And now you're... you're wearing him like a puppet! Give him back!" AraRaash shied away, as far as an ostensibly-bedridden Zora with an ostensibly-broken leg could away from an angry individual wielding a... Spatula? Didn't matter. It wasn't the damage that was vulnerable, it was the belief, information. This was his first pass through this place, as far as he could tell - better to make it mean something. "I..." he started, trying to find the correct intonation, "I can't give Marton back. You're more right than you know, but it doesn't work that way here. Unless something about your world lets it. She threw the spatula at him. He began to yell "I didn't-", but there was no force behind the blow. Just defeat. "I didn't kill him. I didn't hurt anyone. But people are going to get hurt, going to soon. I'm sor-" And that, of course, is when the explosions started.

Oh, yep, no rupees saving. Hmm. I'm done with work in 0.5-1.5 hours so I'll take a look then

Perhaps you could purchase the Mask if you keep Rupees even after dying? I don't think you do, because of the stipend, but perhaps you do.

I'll also note that putting the Village in a position where we have no room for error tends to end with errors occurring.

She’d burned the first batch of cookies. It’d been years since she’d burned a batch of cookies. These weren’t even her special drycakes, they were just normal run-of-the-mill cookies! Well, Coliver could at least partially blame the oven. Her bakery was part of tomorrow’s main attraction, which meant today she was largely shoved into a rather innocuous corner and cooking out of a rather large Goron family’s home. They were very accommodating, though whether out of innate hospitality or the Mayor’s pressuring of those still living on main street she couldn’t say. But she could definitely say their oven ran hot. An easy enough fix; just cool down the fire or bring the racks up higher. She picked the latter. She had a suspicion why she was a bit off in her cooking, why she wanted the room to feel a bit hotter than she would normally want to soothe her chills. That suspicion was currently perscribed bed-rest and being doted on by an all-to-nice Goron patron. And Mazaki. Far too much by Mazaki. Moonfall, she wished all it was was jealousy. Any other day she’d be appalled at that. She liked Marton, but she didn’t like like him… at least she was pretty sure. But Marton had… fallen. And the Not-Marton was still here. Coliver had caught it looking at her a few times, and she didn’t think she exactly was hiding her horror well. Even Tabarun had asked if she was feeling alright. Tabarun. The boy who’d practiced flying into windows to harden his own skull. Still, the worst crime Not-Marton had committed in her presence so far, besides the lying, possible murder, and body-snatching, was stealing some of her cookies, but so was Mazaki and everyone else. She still would have to confront him. But not now, in front of everyone. Soon.

Coliver was the only one who saw Marton fall. The festival was just days away, by Coliver's count, and the pair of Zora were playing up by the waterfall, like they did when they were kids. They'd done it countless times before. They'd been smaller then, and their respective families had warned them to stay away from the water, away from the edge, away. But those warnings were long distant, quieted by joy and reunion and whatever Tormarin had put in the punch bowl. They weren't fully alone, with some of their generation hanging out and talking by the tree line, and Makazi swimming in a calmer eddy. They all see Coliver shriek, then rushed to see Marton sitting a few dozen feet below, dazed and scratched but miraculously unharmed. But Coliver saw him hit the ground, heard the crunch, felt her heart collapse with certainty in that horrible moment. Then she saw his body flash and reassemble in a way that was no miracle. She didn't know what Makazi was talking to. But it wasn't Marton. ~ Signing up as Coliver, a young Zora baker with a strong intuition and sense of judgement. She's running some of the catering for the carnival, excited to meet new people and reunite with some old friends who've scattered across the respective kingdoms after some of the unity of the years faded. One of those friends just took a pretty big tumble! Nope, nothing weird happening here, just ignore that Next Page button. AraRaash opened his eyes to a mouthful of blood and a scream echoing in his bones. So. This would be one of those times. He still wasn't entirely sure how or why, but sometimes he got to keep his own new body when he got into a new loop, but usually he instead got express delivery into the freshest nearby corpse. That led to some odd conversations. He'd gotten pretty good at subtly snapping the necks of those determined to exterminate the "evil spirit" reanimating their former friends. He looked at the fairly young woman looking down at him, scream choked into a stare of horror. AraRaash's tongue turned backwards. Hopefully he wouldn't need to test out that particular skill. What else... she wasn't human. Close, but a bit too orange and... fishy. So was he, for that matter, though his skin tinged purpler. Then a host of strange figures ran up behind, and another fish-person and a hefty rock-folk started clambering down the small cliffside towards him. Something about this was familiar, though he couldn't quite put his finger on it. Was it the webbed fingers? No, something else. Something was missing. A bird? "Goddess, Marton, are you alright?" the third fish-folk asked, bolting towards him. Which was a good question. AraRaash tended to heal fast, and while that fall was... survivable, it wouldn't be pretty. So AraRaash shoved aside hundreds of years of kandra training in favor of eons of experience, and began internally breaking some bones. Nothing too debilitating. Splintered fibula, split collarbone, crack in the skullplate where he could feel the wound that likely ended the real Marton's life. Head injuries could be convinient, and let Ara-Raash-Marton let out a decently convincing "uhhhhh" as he assembled his story. But his eyes were drawn to the other one, the merwoman looking at him still from up above in horror. Not horror at what had happened in the fall. What happened after. She knew. What is this place? We've been somewhere like it. It's hard for me to remember too, AraRaash. Harder than you know. Harder than you could ever imagine, and I know you can imagine worse than this. Are we close? This isn't home, that much is obvious. But the potential here... it could be a clue to reclaiming what we gave up everything for. Or it couldn't be. Perhaps we've been here before, out of what we can remember. Or perhaps it's out of my grasp but you know it, and you'll continue to hate me even more. You'll Survive. You don't need me for that anymore, but I wish it could be more. If nothing else, perhaps you won't be alone in your torment for a few small nights.

Queue Song of Storms … oh yeah. I’ll sign up! As… not sure who as yet. Maybe AraRaash, maybe a more Zelda-y face.

As the prior nominee… Stick’s not kidding about that part

Uh If you don't find anyone in a week, maaaybe. But I'm pretty swamped the rest of January.

This was fun to watch! I was PHitter number 5, which we didn't quite get to because wow that went by fast. I may be around again soon, I'm preoccupied until the end of January but after that I'm pretty home free!

I see Dingo is keeping up with the tradition, at least

Well, the light of breath had finally stopped. That made things simpler. "Kindly grab the communicator from the side panel, it should be blinking for you," Ara said through the intercom, finally unbroken. That would let them talk without needing UberTin or Faleast. It would have been nice to keep Faleast busy, but that wouldn't make sense if they were working together. "What I mean by purpose? The oldest question. This ship's engines were attacked, disabled, and there should be a security team in there trying to get them restarted. That's when you started running for that area." True enough. She was pretty sure someone was in the engine room, but there was a malfunction of zephyr spore engines, which messed with her usual way of detecting how many individuals were there. "I'm Lieutenant Ara of the Life Support Deck. What is your name? And you say you need to get to the engines. Why? Why should I-" Something changed with the airflow in the engine room. It was a zephyr engine, of course. Hard to tell what was happening there. But had someone just died?

Ara gritted her teeth as the signal stopped, then began running again. This was an intercom, not a two-way communicator, which meant she had to listen the hard way - by listening to everything. Which was, of course, impossible, but impossibilities were her and Faleast's specialty. At least, they used to be. She tapped into one of the few powers she could carry with her wherever they went, the capability of sense. Something she'd won through blood, and used through bile. Tin magnified a hundred thousand times over. Despite all the experience - all the countless, forced experience - this was something she was bad at. With it, she could hear everything happening in the ship. Engines, conversations, explosions - not yet - and countless else. She could hear it all. Deciphering it without going mad was another story. Well, she may very well be mad already. Faleast certainly was. Make him do it. "Do you mind?" she whispered, aloud this time, pointing at the light. "He said, 'Me? Running? What does that mean?' " Faleast's voice whispered inside her skull. Storming steel, she did miss working together. As one Twinmind. But this would do. Let him pretend. He'd gotten good at it. But AraRaash was born for it. "Hmm. Get his responses, I'll see if I can get him on an actual comm," she said, pinging up the next few locations before sending the intercom to the running one. Still multiple intercoms, in multiple rooms. "Running means... not walking... moving fast... with purpose. Mine is... too keep... the ship breathing... What... is yours?" Then, just for good measure, she queued in a command to shut a door a hundred or so feet ahead. That could get her in trouble with the Captain, if those other lights were people coming in. Some people had good reason to head to the engine room in an emergency, after all. Many of them in a hurry. But, eh, she'd gotten in trouble with captains before. The cold vacuum of space might be nice this time of year.

AraRaash shoved the thoughts of betrayal and strife to the corner of her mind. She didn't have too long before something slipped, before Faleast caught on her little game and did... whatever it was he'd done, again. Best to play his game, while she thought. Ara watched as a line of breath ran through the corridors of the ship. Alarms. Urgency. The frenzy of motion. The best way to see how well those safety drills translate into practice. But that line was different. She'd watched the drills before, and that line, that individual, they weren't on the last list. They were headed to the engines that were no longer firing, or at least somewhere nearby. It could also just be someone who had missed the last couple drills, or onboarded recently, or flat out someone Ara had ignored as she played her little game. And regardless, it wasn't her job to report possible stowaways. It was her job to keep all the lights green, and undergo the massive changes in oxygen flow that would be needed soon when something inevitably exploded. But, that hadn't happened yet. And one of the worst things Ara'd found while awaiting her doom was boredom. She idly sketched out a small line into a special board she'd bought from a long place ago, making a sketch of a small spren. Its directions were written underneath, and the drawing scrambled to life and through a tiny gap in the prison she called home. The Life Support Deck, that was. Not the real prison. But that didn't matter. With another hand, she started accessing the intercoms along the pathway of the running individual, keying them in one by one. With another, she grabbed a dusty microphone from an unused counter. "Where are... you running... off to... stranger?" Whoo boy, how do I summarize this... The original first game I played here, I created a fairly one-note character named Faleast who was obsessed with the Kandra of that game. He was immediately secretly eaten by that Kandra, turning him into a Shadow tied to the kandra (AraRaash) and me into a SK role with... very little chance to actually win. It was a blast, and somehow I made it out alive without winning, and Faleast and AraRaash have been my main RP characters since. Mostly they go around collecting bits and pieces from the worlds of each game (including one featured here), until they somehow managed to steal several Shards or other powerful things from a game I was running because they weren't grabbed by players. Since then, I've been a bit too IRL busy to make many game appearances, and Faleast and AraRaash... well, they may have bit off more than they could chew. (Which I haven't explained much of... I've been thinking about writing up how they got to this point, but as noted I've been kinda busy. TLDR, AraRaash is not having a good time )

Thanks! There is... a lot of lore, both in many games played and some that's just been in my own head a while (read: what exactly is going on here). That tends to happen when an SE character is accidentally immortalized

The alarm for emergency stations blared, and the SS Tyrian burst into motion. Or most people did. Ara didn't. She instead spun in her usual chair, staring at an indicator panel that suggested to the casual observer that they find a more interesting panel to look at. Most people would agree outside of emergency stations; Ara would partially oppose, even as each light appeared to be a vibrant, verdant green. As would the Captain, she assumed. He considered life support systems relatively important. BEAT. Ara scowled at the panel of lights. It was green. It was bright. The Captain would call it excellent. Most other crew members would call it perfect. Ara, accounting for the mass movement of crew around the ship, might hazard to call it acceptable. Each light was specially configured, one for each room or general area of the ship. Perfect emerald-Stormlight green meant that precisely the amount of oxygen ducted to that room was being used up by the living individuals within that room. If the color tended yellow, that meant that not enough air was getting to the room; if it tended blue, that meant that there was too much. Red meant there was danger. BEAT. Technically speaking, it was Ara's job to make sure that any yellow on the indicator was solved before it became a problem and any red on the indicator was solved sooner than that. She could count on one hand the number of times she'd had to do any of that-NO, SHE COULDN'T. Hmm. Interesting. Ara - AraRaash - didn't move a muscle. One of the benefits of her - his - okay, complicated and irrelevant - kind was that, when faced with such a profound realization of fundamental betrayal that would be best for all that it remain hidden, she could allow it to remain so. Even from the Overseer - Sorrower, the captain, or even the true betrayer. The one she'd held for so long, the one she'd partnered with for... oh, so much longer. You never know what those Scadrians can be up to, whispered her Survivor. Ara - best to go by Ara, she thought - gave a slight nod while looking at her panel. Without those early memories, this reality would have been as long as she could remember. Since when, though? Since they had taken what they should not have, and Faleast the Splinter became Faleast the Shard? Since they'd dared, however brief, to enter in one of the most dangerous places they'd ever known? Since... since she couldn't even remember what that one death was. It was too far away. There was still the here and now. Wherever and whenever that was. On a ship beset by Scadrians - no, Koloss - where Ara controlled life support. With the advantage of zephyr spores to control the airflow, try and get all the green lights to turn on to show that there was no airflow. Though she figured that zephyr was cheating, best to do it with the vents. You think you'll get it again, before they blow something important up? Ara whispered, half to herself and half to the voice in her head that betrayed her. "Maybe, probably not. People tend to wander in the emergencies, makes them harder to predict without using Investiture. Which is good for them, worse for me." Just like this. Good for him, worse for her. She needed to get out of this, but this was Tyrian. She'd been trapped once, perhaps she still was. She didn't let that on, though. Ara was better than that, despite being worse when they were good. When things were good. When... when she didn't know when. BEAT. Ara's pretend job was to hit the right series of buttons controlling people and places and things to get all the lights a pure emerald-Stormlight red. BEAT. She'd managed it thirty-nine million seven hundred sixty-eight thousand ninety-five times in the past five forevers. BEAT. Each time had lasted no longer than one hundred and five years. BEAT. And each time had been TORMENT . . .. ... ... BEAT. Faleast's real job was to Find It. AraRaash's real job was to Survive. Hey all, been a while