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

[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.

[golden_dream]

No one's that nice! --Are they?

[pause] ...I don't even know.

But even if she is, the outcome is the same, isn't it?

[keybroad]

I'm with Rosa. When we talked, Zelda certainly sounded to me like she just had a genuine hope of us eventually escaping. But does it matter if she's nice at heart if her mindset leads to more people dying? I mean, in this game there's supposed to be a lot of death no matter what, which sucks... if we mass hotel we still have to hope for the deaths of... a dozen people... and it's not like everyone will cooperate with that... ugh, I have trouble thinking of a dozen people here I want to see dead. Half a dozen, maybe.

[meatitfeedson]

I certainly don't disagree with that part, going this way everyone but five and Emily and Natsuhi will die, so no matter the intent, it's a bad system. If only we could reasonably show that without being lynched in return.

[keybroad]

Yeah...

[The smile doesn't reach her eyes.]

It'll be rough for "the nine of us". Unless we also hotel several of each other during the big strike, we're not all going to be in "the final five", are we? Which is kind of troublesome. It reduces our ability to have absolute trust. On the other hand, my preexisting group already had that problem, and we managed to not betray each other so far. It's part of why I was willing to bring all of you in.

[meatitfeedson]

Thank you for that, we really appreciate it, particularly after losing Natsuhi-neesan. Whatever we do, and whenever we do it, we definitely have to make sure everyone here is going to be safe, whether that means being in the final five or going to the hotel.

[exequte]

I'm sure that it's eventually going to devolve, but it might be a good argument to make before it starts to. I just don't know if Zelda will accept it, and she's become the leader for quite a few people now, I think. It might just divide everyone into two factions, those who are trying to save as many people as possible in 【each round】, and those who are trying to save as many possible in the 【game as a whole】. Only one person can be sent to the hotel per round, but once they're there then their survival is guaranteed.

The downside to that way of thinking is that everything could become much more uncertain for everyone very quickly, and could ultimately be akin to a death sentence if someone doesn't earn a vote for that round, and thus cannot trade, or if someone else who has an alliance with them tries to protect them at the cost of potentially sacrificing themselves. The positive is that if the hosts see that we're starting to, um, "play by the rules," then they might ultimately give us more votes next time. All they care about is a good show.

Regardless of what else happens, though, if even a very small group of people decide they want to move away from 【list voting】 and towards a 【free for all】, there's a very simple way that they'd be able to force other people to do it too. They could just send Zelda to the hotel.

Someone else could try to take the job that she's been holding, but no one has done it thus far.

[keybroad]

What would be ideal is if the game as a whole faction could still effectively function without publicly lying and destabilizing everything. It's of course possible to just publicly state "us two are voting for Zelda", but that runs the risk of making people decide to not vote for you. And I mean, you were against the way less controversial declaration that we should leave Frank out in the cold.

[exequte]

I never said I was against it, just that openly declaring it in that way seemed like it would be a bad idea right now. As things stand someone is going to die, but naming specific names....

I'm also not saying that we should vote to send Zelda to the hotel, just that if someone wanted to force the game to change, it would be a very easy way to do it, and almost impossible to stop from happening. Only one person would have to, really, if arrangements had already been made for someone else to vote for her. The only problem is that someone would be painting a target on themselves unless the mindset of a larger group also shifted who could protect them.

If we really wanted her gone, we could always just ask Ene to vote for her. She's already said that she doesn't want anyone to vote for her, and if someone who has a vote does volunteer to die for someone else like that, then they would be beyond retribution afterwards.

[keybroad]

That's what I meant, sorry. I was kind of unclear. I meant that you were against the act of making a declaration.

Augh, it's frustrating... It's not like her existence is a problem. We could just, you know, publicly declare that twice people are casting votes for the same person, leave the rest to the list. It's just if she decides to... make people not like us...

You know what, I'll go on record that hotelling Zelda right this round is a bad idea. Same thing I told Zelda about Ib. Other volunteers first.

[meatitfeedson]

I wonder if we could talk to her about the idea of hotelling people even without enough votes to go around. Something tells me she wouldn't want to hear it, that she's entirely intent on finding a way around the game.

[exequte]

I agree that even trying to send her to the hotel right now is wrong. Kyrie's right though, I don't think we'll ever be able to convince her, which is why if anything was going to start it would be easier to send her to the hotel than try to fight every step of the way.

[meatitfeedson]

[She nods.] Without her to rally around, we might be able to convince everyone that it's better to sacrifice more at once in order to save more in the long run. In that case sending her to the hotel would be a good plan. We certainly can't let her die to get rid of her or it will immediately sour the idea.

[exequte]

Exactly. Unfortunately she's unlikely to agree to go, since if she's there she won't be able to organize and try to protect everyone else, and sending her without her volunteering is likely to breed resentment. The neatest solution really would be to have someone who is sacrificing themselves already vote for her, but I don't think very many people will volunteer to die.

[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.