Survival Of The Fittest

The night phase will be ending shortly. This is a last warning for all outstanding actions.

The death of a child is always a tragedy.

Of course, they were nearly all children, by legal definitions, but the life of a magical girl aged one far beyond their years. They fought for their lives, for the lives of everyone they loved or had ever known, every day. Keeping one's innocence in such circumstances was a near-impossibility. No, those among them that could still truly be considered children were few and far between.

The youngest among them, YUMA CHITOSE, could not have understood the gravity of her circumstances. Her guardian yet lived, and she mourned, she should have been there to protect her, she should have been stricter, she had banned her from leaving the house at night but she'd been too eager to help, too willful. That willfullness cost her her life.

Hers was not the only death that night, though the other seemed inevitable to all who knew her.

SAYAKA MIKI, after all, cared for nothing more than justice. Despite the obvious risk to life and limb, there was no chance she would be able to keep herself from investigating these terrible crimes. For her trouble, she was permanently silenced. An occupational hazard, perhaps, but still, anything she had learned in her travels had died along with her.

The nights grew evermore silent and still.

---

YUMA CHITOSE - FOLLOWER (Emprexx Plush)
SAYAKA MIKI - GUNSMITH (MurderWeasel)

Day 4 begins now and will run until Thursday, September 19th at 6 PM EST or until a vote to lynch is reached.

11 alive means 6 to lynch. Dark clouds are closing in.

So I know there was a point a couple days ago how a "RIP" after night deaths could be viewed as Sus because it's something Mafia will do to blend in and also gloat but I think I'm justified in saying uh

FUCKING RIP

Damn. If I didn't know the role cop was already dead I'd have said that mafia definitely had one. Or is it just me that a lot of power roles have been dying?

Maybe it's just plain bad luck.

The entire bee movie script?

I would want to read that just to make sure if Plush for some reason slip their actual reads into it but

Well, to get back on track, I think it'd be worthwhile to identify leads that MW and EP were considering in their lifetimes as townspeople and continue to pursue those. In case it isn't sort of obvious by know I put a lot of stock in MW's reads given his experience in Mafia and knack for articulating his reads incredibly well. MW was looking at Riki, and so was EP. EP exclusively considered Grim sus, which I actually agreed with, but MW did not.

But we should probably look at both of them and what they've done since they were listed as suspicious.

Grim looks at the train forming on Deamon and casts doubt on it on the grounds of it being based on little info. I disagree with this and I think it was based on an unwavering commitment to not commit to anything, really, only offering minimal replies that didn't really contribute anything, and the reasoning of others (MW and Kami most specifically) was clear from the moment they started pushing for the lynch.

I'm going to third the call for a Grim read list to be re-upped, since it's something I think could be worthwhile.

Correct me if I'm wrong again but Riki hasn't actually said anything since being called out. Which I think is important? Or at least indicative of something

But yeah I think investigating these two is probably worth our time.

That's because there was very little calling me out actually since the focus fell on deamon fast.

Feel free to ask anything to help you manage your doubts.

My post was, of course, going to be almost verbatim what MS says...including the part about suspicions towards me. That said:

Me wrote:While I'm not eager to stand up for Deamon (and am fully cognizant that their flip could damn me even further in some people's eyes), given I have basically no reads on anyone right now, I'm not wild about how quickly this train seems to be forming on so little info? We've got a little time, we can afford to investigate our options. I'm still working on reworked reads post talking about my thoughts. In my own defense though, I hopped off the blast train before it lost steam: you can't accuse me of trying to screw blast unless you're accusing me of a larger gambit, such as buying the claim and wanting to use a mafia NK on them instead.

I didn't see the Deamon case. I understand it a little better now with the EP/Murder flips (my guess is that either EP had followed Deamon or Murder had investigated (I...think the Strongman would be considered a gun-holding character) and moved accordingly?). EP's suspicions of me wouldn't have anything to do with their power (yes I'm crumbing).

Two quick thoughts, though, one about meta (that's never gone wrong before!) and one mild suspicion.

Meta: Two kills per night across two nights says to me we've probably got two scummy factions. The first night I could maybe see a Vig in play, but I'm not sure a Vig would have taken a shot at EP or at Murder give their track record at scum hunting. My guess is we're looking a three-man scum team and 1 SK, but I currently have no idea about the format of those teams. The Mami and Sayaka flips do make me pretty confident that the core cast of Puella Magi Madoka is not any kind of mafia (with maybe a Homura exception but I'm not sure).

Mild Sus: ironically, towards MS. MS claimed they have no role on Day One, which reads a bit more suspicious following Deamon's VT safeclaim. I don't see any particular pattern that aligns them with our flips thus far, but it makes me a little wary.

Including the rough draft of reads I had been working on/rethinking over the past two days. Also, offering the shittiest of shitty defenses: I was actually going to jump on the Deamon train at the end, but kind of...forgot about Mafia, remembered the looming deadline, and discovered I'd missed the dayphase. So at the very least I'm...pretty crappy town.

[+] reads

Okay so: when I started writing this, the only pieces of concrete information I had were my own role and flavor, as well as the role and flavor of a dead player. Obviously things have change. I'm gonna try and figure out why.

blastinus
I trusted blast's flavor (I was sure Mami was in the game, and I didn't think it would be used as a safeclaim). I also trusted that they probably had the powers they claimed. I just was not sure that they were town-affiliated. If scum is a magical girl team, I would absolutely put Mami on it (in this scenario, my assumption on flavor was that we were playing one of the time loops where magical girls are hunting other magical girls specifically to try and stop the witch system). One of the reasons I was really pro-blast was that I honestly didn't think we lost very much by lynching them, and the information we gained would clarify a lot for me. This probably would have been true if we'd mislynched last phase, but given the sheer power of the Town hivemind, we didn't. And when blast got NKed, we lost a potentially-helpful role, and I feel somewhat responsible for that.

boogie

I'm moderately confident that boogie/blast are mutually exclusive as scum: it strikes me as unlikely that two different scum would claim power roles so quickly (I know boogie's only claimed a passive power at this juncture, and I doubt they'd have announced . I'm specifically not asking for boogie's role or flavor at this juncture in case they're town-aligned. My reasoning here is that boogie is taking a helluva gamble coming forward, one way or another, and if they're keeping something back I respect that.

imma be level real with yall i just spoke truth because i was worried the vig with the chip on their gun would try to double tap my ass tonight if i didn't say anything, or maybe they'd try to fucking be like "i shot this man and he did not die, ban he" and out themself in a way thatd be beneficial to literally no one so i wanted to head that off at the pass like a glorious diversion that'd allow maf to shoot me tonight if they wanted to idk whatever im sure they could think of many better uses of their time

Like, yeah, it's not impossible that boogie is playing a deep game, but right now their reasoning makes sense to me and I think there's more reasons to keep them in play than to get rid of them.

Most of the above was written pre-Poly vote and pre-night phase. I stand by most of it: boogie seems logistically sound. I will say that my certainty on their town alignment was decreased from 90-95% to 80-85%. I'm still getting powerfully town signs, but on a strict probability level, with the number of town roles that have flipped, I'm slightly less confident (while still...pretty fucking confident

Zetsu/Rugga

So in my original post, even though it's not 100% fair to Zetsu, I had already started using some light Rugga stuff to justify my thoughts on them.

Rugga wrote:I don't feel like knowing the source would be super helpful for this one. There are good character and then bad characters. I'd speculate that there's probably some kind of like....I don't remember what the name of the role is but basically in the show girls fight witches and if they get too overworked or emotionally unstable then they become witches and other girls must kill them. So there's probably like, some kind of alliance switching rolls or something. Other than that I'm not sure that theme knowledge would be a huge help or hindrance.

Vanilla townie is a go-to for scum, it's true, because it can't be proven. However, it would also be the claim of someone with a power role who doesn't want to be hit come night. It could also be the truth.

These initial posts really worried me, combined with what I read as a soft axis forming between Blizzard, Murder, Blast, and Zetsu. Now that theory is an absolute disarray, and I have no idea what to do here. My immediate instinct is that Zetsu is essentially unreadable for...probably a whole day phase? Unless someone's got third-party information.

Emprexx Plush

Plush wrote:I would be shocked if there wasn't a vigilante in this set up magical girls fight each other almost or more than they fight witches, usually with strong personal reasons.

EP won early town points for me for echoing a lot of my flavor thoughts, and I respected their insights (even the ones that were suspicious of me!). Their role as Follower makes me think we should look closely at their leads, like

MurderWeasel

I'm not gonna quote Murder too much because Murder was all over my radar. Like they're saying something I strongly agree with and others that feel like they're stalling and others that ping my scumdar and I have no idea what to do with this read. Like a lot of what's tipping me is Murder either saying things before I or echoing or emphasizing things I'm thinking? The best way I can explain my feelings towards Murder is that I 100% agree with what they're saying about EP (in terms of the weird and random isn't a disqualifier for potential utility) and for some reason it still reads like scum trying to get townpoints. Then add in the flip (

Primrosette

Jilly

Polybius

BlizzardeyeWonder

MethodicalSlacker

General Goose

Cactus

KamiKaze

Kami wrote:Though,there might be a few transformative roles because of the source material? Like, a few Judases or something.

This is a good thought, although it worries me a little because it could be a form of crumbing? Like Kami could be trying to lay a case for jumping on someone we thought was innocent on the chance they might have converted.

Mimi

Not much in the way of reads, given low inactivity. And then they dropped and had their powers passed on to Zetsu, so...

Riki[/u[

The early fast-hit on blast reads a little more suspicious post-flip. I obviously liked Riki early because their suspicions seemed to align with my own,

Deamon

Sort of...obvious now, I guess. But I will say that Deamon did not ping my scumdar at all. Their play seemed very typically Deamon and very aligned with my own.

Sorry for second-post, but forgot to mention: I'm gonna keep expanding on that reads list as the days go on.

j

still here, reads eventually, i feel real bad tonight for some illness reason i guess

No votes have been cast.

Approximately 4 days remain. 11 alive means 6 to lynch. Is this the calm before the storm?

Alright, I've been busy with IRL (again, I'm moving), but I can weigh in quickly.

This is a good thought, although it worries me a little because it could be a form of crumbing? Like Kami could be trying to lay a case for jumping on someone we thought was innocent on the chance they might have converted.

Oh, I can clarify. Basically, it was random musing on my part. I thought it made a certain amount of sense, given the source material (the whole "SOOL JIM TURN TO GREEF SID" thing). However, Boogie rightfully reminded me that there are no Judases in this game because Fen-Kyubey doesn't want any bastards. It was me thinking about the flavor, kinda, and forgetting this wasn't a bastard game.

I might have more thoughts later. I'm all tired and probably not making a lick of sense right now.