The Murder Challenge

[Kennifer]

Michelle just... sat down, quietly, trying to put the pieces together in her mind. Lucintsea's plan, which... at least if the switch had gone as planned that part ended up being for naught, but if Ctharlak was actually blocked... that could mean they weren't a killer in the first place, or if they were the other killer struck last night. The kills last night didn't seem to take the same level of physical strength as ripping off Hypercam's arm did on the first night, anyway.

She sighs; she'd hoped that trying to focus on the case would help, but seeing her friends dead like that... she only hoped their killer or killers would be caught.

[PopcornPie]

Entrapta nodded towards Michelle with a look of pure understanding and sympathy. Now she felt a new wind in her sails, a new drive. She wanted Hypercam avenged, but they weren't able to do it. The most she could do was at least try to avenge Michelle's closest friends.

"Okay, what we need to do is figure out how two people were killed. Unless they had some kind of psychic power or elongated limbs, it's impossible for any one person to smother two people at once with pillows. Simply put, one arm would not provide enough pressure compared to two arms pressing down on the nose and mouth together. I know the immediate excuse is 'what if they were strong enough'? One, the strongest people in our game group are now dead. Two, the person would still have had to ensure equal pressure was run through either arm, which is more difficult than it sounds. Three, one of them could have woken up and started crying for help. We have no proof that Nintendo and Sega were equally heavy sleepers, and with how nervous they were about being killed, why wouldn't they immediately snap awake if they realized they couldn't breathe? In order to stay unconscious, the killer either had help or used chloroform, or something similar to it."

> Chloroform?

[Florien]

Michelle explicitly couldn't have done this. The Alpha cannot be killed by their... not-quite-chained. This kill was not Michelle, and because the other was blocked, that team cannot be the team that exists.




I do not believe that it is Neptune, the one who has always been here and is definitely not a replacement for Gundham who never existed in this place, and it cannot be any rolebearer. Yet they went after a useless role, so they must have figured out the core elements of my plan.



Therefore, get over the social deduction thing. It doesn't matter how hard to do something is, it doesn't matter how the murder was done. What matters is that it's pretty likely that Neptune is a killer. It's also likely someone who would actually think through everything is the killer.



The ones who have been the most visible about thinking are Ctharlak and Selenium. Ctharlak was blocked last night so we'll never find anything linking there. I think it's obvious what the next choice is.




/Vote Selenium


Oh, also, for your information I didn't switch Kanade and Michelle. I swapped myself and Selenium, expecting them to go for the strong-weak-link in the visible plan, myself who would theoretically be unprotected. 

Either they'd go for Michelle and eliminate a roleless, narrowing the possibility space, or they'd not go for Michelle, proving her guilt or possibly because they doubted me. 

If they doubted me, they might go for me directly. Bang, Selenium is dead, narrowing the possibilities or eliminating a guilty. It's a simple plan. It even gives us information when it fails like this, where the role of the murdered eliminates the possibility of it being a Michelle Ctharlak team.

[PointMaid]

So on top of accusing me of this, you nearly got me KILLED. That's nice. Real nice to hear your regard for life. Not that you haven't been cavalier about this ENTIRE TIME.

[PopcornPie]

"And Neptune's not even in the room with us, so we can't interrogate them right now. Yeah, Captain's right. Though Michelle would have had Nintendo and Sega's trust, we were never told that we could have more than one role. And we did suspect Michelle once or twice, right? It'd be wiser to leave a repeat suspect to live and possibly take the fall than kill her and bring suspicion closer to yourself."

[PointMaid]

//Ah, Popcorn, you're really not supposed to delete or modify posts as a player in murdergames. Posts are considered potential evidence.

[PopcornPie]

//Sorry. That deleted post was just premature. Nothing was on it but some formatting.

[Florien]

I didn't nearly get you killed. I either got you killed or didn't, and seeing as you're standing here, I didn't. Your death would have provided important information, as would have Michelle's, and as has Nintendo and Sega's.

Besides, if it's not you, we simply eliminate the next. I have a strategy to keep the remaining rolebearers safe, and eventually the killers will either eliminate themselves by my actions or be revealed by the lack of other options. 

We're at four roleless to three rolebearers. If we can make that even, if any claimed roleless gets eliminated tomorrow night, we win by default, because we execute one then the other and there's not a thing they can do to stop us.

And I'm confident I can make it even.

[Kennifer]

"I know I have nothing but my word that I'm innocent. Do I seem the sort to let a teammate kill my best friends in order to avoid suspicion myself? From what you know of me, is... is that the sort of person you think I am? Because it isn't. I want to find out who killed my friends as much as any of the rest of you. Well, those who aren't sussy bakas."

"As for suspecting me, that was what, Bywyn? It was going through everyone, and only suspected me because I wondered why it was so quick to vote. And... whatever reason Lucintsea here has me on a suspect list which is probably just my lack of a proveable role, or my reluctance to vote yesterday before hearing from everyone to avoid, well... what happened the first day. Which we didn't do anyway, and set an innocent Mettaton to his doom."

"I know I said that I was less important to protect than one of the power roles, but that doesn't mean I'm especially eager to see you pretty much doom yourselves by voting off an innocent."

[Kennifer]

(the above directed primarily at Entrapta)

[PopcornPie]

"I tried to avoid voting, too. I still will. But things don't look good for Selenium right now." She rubbed her chin. "If Lucintsea knows you're the alpha, though, why would she continue to suspect you? Knowing what she does about roles, and how each of us only has one."

[Despair's Archon of Memes]

... Wait... Something about this doesn't add up... Luci just... reveals they're the Driver unexpectedly, comes up with a plan involving both me and Entrapa doing specific night actions... we did those actions last night... and then today's murder wasn't even one of us! And then when confronted about this, you say "Oh, the killer was clever enough to avoid the plan!" ... We LITERALLY just told the scum what we were going to do at night. Well, me and Entrapa at least.

Something tells me that the "plan" that we set up last night... was more of a way to telegraph to the scum team "Hey, this is what the town's going to do tonight, don't kill such and such". Then, when today's body was found and it was revealed that the "plan" didn't work... You blamed it on "Guess the Killer was more clever than we thought!"

Something tells me you're lying about your Driver role. It's probably just a giant hunch that I have, and it's... PROBABLY wrong... I mean, Bwyn's whole thing was wrong, too... And so was Mettaton's... but... again... I MIGHT be on to something here. Again, just a hunch.

[PointMaid]

...Sega and Nintendo were said to be the alphas. Michelle just claimed to be the Alpha Friend.

[Florien]

Voting off an innocent doesn't doom us though. It barely changes anything at this point. We're at 5-2. Two roleless, three rolebearing, and two hostiles.

If we follow the strategy of us three with the roles privately coordinating actions each night, we have a good chance of avoiding being killed, and become effectively a bear-trap, where touching us has a good chance of killing whoever tries it.

And we win if we eliminate everyone who's out to get us, and the only ones out to get us are the ones who haven't claimed roles because they quite literally cannot.

Then Lucintsea catches onto what Entrapta's saying.

Nintendo and Sega were the alphas. Michelle was chained-on. she was their selection. She could not kill them. She could still be a hostile. Please try to keep facts straight.

And then when Kanade says something utterly stupid...

You know for a fact I'm the driver. Otherwise Coldsteel wouldn't be dead. I would have been called out by the real driver if there was a different real driver. The plan was to keep the rolebearers all safe as possible, while eliminating roleless. The plan relied on them thinking all of us followed it, when in practice, only you two followed it and I didn't. The plan still worked, in a sense. It just didn't work as well as it could have.

[Kennifer]

"This is true. They added me to their group chat the first night. Beyond that, I was just a Normie. Sadly unproveable, but true."

[PopcornPie]

"Hm...Just because I blocked Ctharlak doesn't mean he could have been a murderer anyway. It just means I kept him from doing anything even if he had the power to." She stands next to Kanade. "And furthermore, I'm not exactly happy about how you were so quick to have Mettaton killed, despite the lack of evidence across all the past days of him doing anything remotely suspicious. On the other hand, Kanade, she wants us alive. So she can effectively kill us herself, but she does want us alive."

[Despair's Archon of Memes]

... Right. Again, probably just a random hunch I had. I just wanted to get it out of the way and into discussion. Sorry about that.

[Florien]

Okay, so something... came up. I can only swap people twice apparently. Whatever, the point is, I'm very important right now, so here's what we're going to do.

We can't do the bear-trap strategy, but we can make it extremely difficult to target us, the rolebearers, the three keys to success.

Entrapta blocks a random potential killer, any of the ones who's claimed no role, each night. Kanade protects either me, Entrapta, or herself each night. We do not make either blob of information public. One moment.


>Lucintsea looks for paper and a writing implement.

Either way, that means that there's a fairly high chance that either the one who's blocked will try to kill and fail, or they'll try to kill a protected one and fail, and we can eliminate another roleless.

[PopcornPie]

Entrapta's eyebrows flatten. "And what if Kanade or myself get killed? What then? At the rate you're expositoring these plans for any potential killer to hear..."

[Kennifer]

"I would at least like to hear from Neptune. I'm pretty sure she'll say she's a Normie as well, but... well, since our killer cleaned up well enough that we need to base this solely on social deduction I think that works better if we get to know everyone. And she'd inherited Gundham's role and he was also strangely quiet, and people suspected him for it... she should at least be here."

"It's some combination of two of Ctharlak, Neptune, and Selenium. Well, unless someone claiming a power role is lying and Neptune actually has that role now. Ctharlak couldn't act last night if they're a Baka and the roleblocking happened."

Michelle bowed her head.

"I just need to know who killed them."

[Florien]

Yeah, but the plan being revealed in this case doesn't matter because we haven't explicitly said which way we're arranging it. You'd be more in danger if you weren't aware of this plan, because they'd just pick us off.

[PopcornPie]

"I'm gonna think harder about this than I have any other time. Dont worry...too much." Entrapta sat outside the room to brood. The tape recorder was unsheathed once again.

"We already knew there was more than one killer left. I roleblocked Ctharlak, so he couldn't have done anything if he was one of them. But there is no physically possible way one killer could have smothered two people to death at the same time, unless they'd been sharing a bed. Michelle claims she is a normie despite being the other half of the Alpha connection with the now deceased duo. I hope, for her sake, she wasn't pushed to kill her own closest friends. Someone called Neptune is, this is a big surprise, being completely silent about anything, and who knows if Jamie will give us enough time to wait for their input. I really think that Nintendo and Sega would have been able to figure out somehow if Michelle did something out of line, because the three of them were in a chatroom together..."

[Florien]

But it is possible that one person working alone did it, because it is impossible it wasn't. Kills are done by one individual at a time. Otherwise blocking would be pointless. The method of murder is completely irrelevant.

Lucintsea pauses.

The optimal choice is to protect those of us with roles. We know we are all not the killers for a fact. We also know the killer could not have claimed a role, so we just need to make them waste a kill and/or eliminate one right here and now. 

So Selenium needs to die, then we can set up for tonight, then we eliminate down the list until we win. Or we don't, if we get unlucky and fail to successfully block one of their nightkills.

[PopcornPie]

"...Are we sure? We've never been told only one person can kill per night."

[Florien]

//That's just how the rules work in every mafialike, because it's mafia. Nightkills are associated with a single PC. If that PC is blocked, they can't do anything.