6 999s + 3 Ushiromiyas (TNDG Day 6)

[keybroad]

((CONTENT WARNING: Extremely dubious and detailed discussion of teenager's assisted suicide in the Help A Robot thread??? There is also a lot of yelling in some of the other threads that has dubious properties due to domestic context IT'S BEEN A MONTH SINCE THIS LOG AND I WASN'T IN ALL THE THREADS SO PEOPLE PLEASE HELP ME IF THERE ARE CONTENT WARNINGS I AM NOT INCLUDING...))

[It is the morning after the tattoo game and the ominous vote distribution. Breakfast of milkshakes and whatever else people brought is set out on a conference table in the sci-fi set. Through the doorways, from the room where these people all sleep, there is a faint smoke from the candle at the shrine for Seven, a counter with a portrait, water, and fruit.

Lotus lifts her eyebrows once everyone is there.]

Hip hip hooray, let's face the day.

Comments

[keybroad]

Then we should keep it at misdirection. Just don't vote for her and keep suggesting that others vote for other people. It's not immediately likely that someone will vote for her right now to repay a debt. She's voted for Aku who has no votes to repay her and Mary who is currently voting for Ib. Even if Mary knew... could she really vote for her over Ib?

[golden_dream]

...Speaking of Ib...

I had an idea, if we happen to get a sudden death which gives us one more vote than we have people.

But, I'm not sure it's the best idea... Can I tell you just to hear what you think about it?

[keybroad]

[Smiling, like a bear]

I'm listening.

[golden_dream]

We know Mary-chan is going to vote for Ib-chan... even if someone told her not to.

It's the perfect opportunity for someone to put their vote on Ib-chan and see her safely to the hotel.

--Mary-chan will no-doubt throw a tantrum, but she'll volunteer to go next round, and there, both children are safe.

Natsuhi-nee-san is at the hotel. She can look after them just fine.

[keybroad]

Volunteering is... a lot to assume, isn't it? She hasn't volunteered before and she seemed to really not like the idea of a consolation prize... what if she still wants a grand prize like "Ib and Mary live forever in a castle where fairies do all the work and adults never bother them to pay rent" so going to the hotel doesn't make her feel better? I told Eva this earlier - I think the best way to send them into the hotel is together so neither of them can vote unpredictably afterwards.

But you have a point that opportunities to evict without controversy are hard to come by.

[exequte]

You're forgetting something important. Unless we have an extra vote, doing anything like that is going to let someone else die. Then whoever it was who cast their vote that way would in a way be sacrificing themselves too.

[keybroad]

I mean, I agree. Like Rosa originally said about how this would be if we got to the point of an extra vote from a lot more sudden tragedies, I admit that there are very few circumstances where what I'm saying wouldn't be controversial.

[Then why dance around it!!! Well, she is a dancer.]

[meatitfeedson]

[She shakes her head.]

Flip the chessboard over. What they want is entertainment. If no one dies this time, they're going to give us even fewer votes next time for sure. And that trend will continue. Knowing this, what's the difference in depriving someone of a vote today or two days from now? They'll die soon anyway. If anything, our hosts might find that more enjoyable and reward us. I don't think there's any point in talking about "when or if we have enough votes" at this point. We need to suck it up and do something drastic sooner or later.

I'm not saying "let's do it now", though. Only that we should start preparing for that necessity. Get any bad feelings out of your system, and then look for an opportunity.

[golden_dream]

...The more I think about it, the more I think this game is like one of Maria's 'wolf and sheep' puzzles.

[keybroad]

The chessboard... the chessboard... [Lotus has never actually heard Kyrie say that word before and it's giving her a brain blast like on good old Jimmy Neutron, not that she has ever seen this show. She rises to her feet, suddenly very agitated.]

I understand why Zelda acts the way she does now!

Because from one point of view, this isn't a game of chess, right? If you accept their terms. You can easily reason "the more people who are alive at the end, the better", and if that number of survivors is going to be more than five, some of those people will be in the hotel. But by refusing to let people get hotelled at the cost of others, losing as few pieces at once as possible, like Zelda says, it becomes an endurance match instead. Like chess - where the only thing that really matters is having your king on the board at the end. Nobody considers Zelda a dispensable piece right now. At this rate it's incredibly easy to imagine her being one of the last five with nobody else joining Emily and Natsuhi.

[Or Zelda could just have a really big hope of escaping. It could be that.]

You're right that, whenever we do something, it has to be decisive, though. The second someone doesn't list-vote, that's it for their credibility. I mean, you hear the way I talk about Frank, that's how people are gonna talk about us, and at least some of us aren't gonna be in the hotel after voting unless we get allocated an astronomical portion of the votes. [She lifts her hand.] Though. Frank was worse. It was fully circulated that three people were supposed to vote for Emily, he had no chance of accomplishing anything without a confederate and also nobody had even died back then.

[golden_dream]

That's why she's been doing it...?!

[meatitfeedson]

Well, I doubt that's quite the case with Zelda, she seems too good for that, but who knows? I've had my doubts too. The worst case scenario in regard to her would be an ulterior motive like that. But the more probable one is that she's genuinely that nice.

[meatitfeedson]

[She nods.] That's right. If there's nine of us working together, and assuming it stays that way, we should wait until the number is down to at least twenty or so before even trying something like that. And that's even assuming at least a few of us have more than one vote. Only when we can be reasonably certain we'll have enough votes in the next round to keep one another safe from death.

[golden_dream]

I don't know. She's very attached to her little friend. I might be wrong, of course...

Can we really do that? I mean, we've only ever had one extra vote from a pool of enough to save all of us... It'd take three random deaths to get enough votes to do that.

[keybroad]

[Drags hand down face.] There's so much uncertainty. How many votes, whose many votes. If the only outcomes are the final five, dead, or in the hotel...

[She shakes her head.] Well, first things first. Katou volunteered to go into the hotel, so unless he publicly changes his mind, someone going into the hotel before him is probably gonna be no good.

[golden_dream]

Katou...? Who's he? Someone reliable, or unreliable?

[keybroad]

[Raises hand indecisively.] We hang out sometimes. I voted for him last round, he's supposed to be voting for me now. He plays the games pretty cooperatively without using it as an excuse to beat people up.

[golden_dream]

You sure you're not being fooled...?

[keybroad]

I'm pretty confident in my ability to become an onryo and haunt him.

[She clearly doesn't mean this literally]

[meatitfeedson]

I'd vouche for his reliability. He's a real dirty punk, but a good kid, you know? At least, that's the impression I get. Anyway I gave him a pack of cigarettes to keep him from withdrawal so I'd think that's a good enough favour to feel I can trust him.

[keybroad]

If you think both of us can trust him, then maybe in the future we can both approach him and talk about us both voting for him in the context of a hotelling occurring at the same time as a death.

[meatitfeedson]

At the least, I think he's reasonable enough to not freak out at the idea, even if he wasn't for it.

[golden_dream]

If he's reliable, we should try to keep him in the game, and away from the hotel, right...?

We're going to end up with enough people who are willing to let everyone die if the good people are who we send to the hotel.

[exequte]

That would only work if she asked him to specifically ask in front of everyone that we let her be voted out. I don't think that would work very well anyway, because why would anyone listen to him more than they did to her? Either way, I don't think that's what he's going to do.

If we really come down to it, the only person she really needs to convince is Zelda, though, since Zelda is always the one who organizes the votes. If she doesn't want anyone to vote for her, Zelda can just put her name at the bottom of the list of who she's trying to find votes for.

[meatitfeedson]

That's right, if she makes Santa do it, then it becomes Santa's fault. But if she tells Zelda what she told him, then it's more likely to happen without anyone even noticing.