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OK, brace yourselves ... push Ms. Priestess, push!
The Axis of Evil
A self-defence-cum-conspiracy theory by Whisky Priestess, aged 26 ¾
First, a few points. Barbelith is down at the moment and I don’t know when it’ll be up again or who will have posted to the thread in the mean time, so this might not be completely up-to-date. Before I get going I will take a moment to say:
“Orr! Chill! Not everything is about you! My objections to being made to vote early were directed at Qalyn, who most definitely is trying to force me to show my tiny hand. So don’t get your knickers in such a twist. I don’t see Qalyn getting all hysterical and hard-done-by and he’s the one I was actually talking to, as any fule could have seen.”
First of all the disclaimer: I have not been working with or, indeed, against anybody throughout this game – until last round, when Orr decided to make an example of me and forced me to set myself up against him. In doing so I also tried to exonerate those whom I believed to be innocent (including Isz and Stoat) and expose those whom I believed to be guilty.
In the interests of fairness and logic I’m now going to include everybody except myself and Stoatie in my attempt to work out who is what. Having done that I’m going to try and address the points against me and then, obviously, put forward my reasons why I think Orr, Qalyn and one other are working together as mafia.
Point One – Why pick me?
I think that this mafia has a gameplan, and has had from the very start, of
a) misdirection
b) covering their tracks
c) getting a bunch of patsies to take the fall (scuse my gangland slang)
They are clearly bright enough to realise that if they play successfully, the villagers will be left with a dwindling pool of suspects to choose from, so that it’s in their interests to start building a case against three others as soon as any opportunity presents itself. It’s a shame that all three attempts to lynch a lady (assuming none were daring double-bluffs) have so far failed, but in each case another innocent has been lynched anyway and thus suspicion still hovers above my head in particular.
On the plus side (for them) the mafia has been careful to keep the patsies alive and thus may yet survive this round, in which case we’re all doomed, skies turn to blood etc. What I’m saying is that through some extremely lucky or clever deduction by the doctor we have been given another chance and I reckon we should use it to lynch either Orr or Qalyn – in tactical terms I really don’t mind which, although personally I would prefer Orr because he has so consistently victimised me.
Why me indeed? As most people know by now we know one another in real life. We have also chatted about the game, and I have to admit I was surprised and a little bit suspicious when he started off (IRL, not on the thread) accusing me of being mafia, then suddenly decided to accept my innocence – presumably because he thought that if he kept on teasing me about being mafia I might bite back and blow his friendly-barman cover. Why the sudden change of heart? I can only assume it was so that I didn’t start seriously suspecting him until he had finished setting me up.
The fact that he knows me IRL means that he can make various vague and baseless accusations based on things I have said or done IRL, none of which can be proven or backed up, but all of which are designed to create a miasma of guilt over me. (I realise I’m doing the same above – just trying to set the scene, atmosphere fans).
This is like Fermat’s “wonderful proof” there wasn’t enough room for in the margin – tantalising and (we are assured) utterly conclusive, but oh dear, what a shame – no-one can see it but Orr! His case against me remains nebulous, but for the matter of the votes I cast in the bjacques and Todd lynchings – I’ll come to those in a minute. I’m actually surprised Orr didn’t try to link me with Iszabelle, who was after all one of the other people drawing suspicion and votes away from Bengali in the bjacques vote – but then again he needs Iszabelle’s help this round, plus he had already decided on his patsies.
Let’s not forget that Orr doesn’t really need to prove his case against BiP or lolita – he had already tried and failed in earlier rounds to garner some support against them, and obviously figured that they weren’t suspicious enough to work as lynching targets. If he could tie me in, though – me with my well-known antipathy towards Bendt Chromeo, me with my loudmouthed tendencies which probably would have got me killed in the last game had I not been confirmed innocent – well, there might be just enough suspicion and paranoia and fear in the room to hang me.
To be fair, he has managed to trump up a fair-sized mountain out of a molehill, but let me explain why my voting patterns in the Todd and bjacques votes actually argue against me being mafia rather than for.
Point Two – what about the votes?
The Todd vote went like this.
Bjacques – Todd
Bitchlaces – Todd
Iszabelle – Todd
Lolita – Todd
BC – Bitchlaces
Qalyn – Lolita
Stoatie – Todd
Orr – Lolita
Whisky – Todd
Lionheart – Todd
BiP – Todd
Todd forfeit
My vote for Todd was the sixth. In the order of voting I was ninth. I have to say (although I didn’t realise it at the time) that yes, up until then it might have been possible (had Todd himself voted) to have a split vote with Lolita and Todd, or even Bitchlaces and Todd, on five votes each.
But I voted as I said I was going to early on (changing my vote to accommodate the circs would have been more suspicious, I reckon) – and more to the point, assuming just for a moment than Bengali, lolita and I were in league together – I could have been certain that Bengali would vote for either Bitchlaces or Todd. Hell, I could even have voted for lolita if I’d wanted, in the certain knowledge that Bengali would vote for Todd and save lolita.
Why, if I were mafia and knew all these things, would I go out on a limb and cast my vote at what turned out to be a crucial moment, exposing myself to suspicion? Answer – as far I was concerned it wasn’t a crucial moment. I wasn’t vote-crunching, I was suspicious of Todd and had made that clear earlier. I didn’t much care who else was being accused but I had no particular reason at that point to suspect either Bitchlaces or lolita.
If I had done as I did do at that juncture, as a Mafioso, it would have been a very silly move indeed. And I’m not that dumb. As an innocent villager, who was not worrying about the implications of voting patterns or what players with a grudge might make of them, it was a pretty obvious thing to do. Get online, vote for who I think is guilty, end of story.
Same can be said of the bjacques vote, except even more so. Here’s the breakdown.
BC – bjacques
Orr – BiP
Qalyn – bjacques
Bjacques – Qalyn
Bitchlaces – BiP
Whisky – bjacques
Iszabelle – bitchlaces
Stoatie – Bitchlaces
Lolita – Stoatie
BiP – bjacques
By the time I was voting there were 2 votes for Bengali from you-know-who and Bitchlaces, and two for bjacques from Qalyn and BC. It was round about this time that Orr started airing his suspicions about Bengali – suspicions which were strengthened (in the eyes of much of the village) by the fact that she had not forwarded her innocent PM to Bendt Chromeo.
I actually preferred not to vote for her in this case because I had a sneaking suspicion that the reason she might not have forwarded her PM to BC was that she was actually the Doctor, like BC had pretended to be, and would therefore not know what an ordinary villager PM looked like. I presume that Orr’s attempt to get her lynched was to see whether she was in fact the Doctor – no skin off his nose if not, because we would still be another innocent down, but what a coup if the Mafia managed to get the village to lynch the last character who could really help them! I don't want to land you in shit btw Bengali if you really are the doctor - this is just my opinion and I have to be honest about my motives or I may well fry.
Let’s again assume that BiP is mafia and I am trying to save her from the rope. (We could do the same with Bitchlaces, who subsequently garnered 2 votes, and lolita, whose vote for Stoatie could easily be interpreted as a bid to save him. Except he was innocent, whoops.)
So we stand at bjacques 2, Bengali 2, Qalyn 1.
Now, if I am Mafia (and even if I’m not) I know that Bengali will vote to save herself, making it:
Bjacques 3, Bengali 2, Qalyn 1.
So there’s no need at all for me to incur unnecessary suspicion by voting then, or voting for bjacques. The simple reason I voted for bjacques is because I thought BC and Qalyn had somehow blundered into a live one. Forgive me for nominating the people I actually believed to be guilty! Even after my vote nothing was decided – in fact by voting earlyish I made myself unable to save or condemn anyone at the eleventh hour.
Thus, I would have had to pretty fucking thick to vote in that manner and at that time if I were a Mafioso trying to avoid suspicion –or even if I was a Mafioso trying to save one of my mates. I might as well have worn a big T-shirt saying Cosa Nostra – but I wasn’t trying to avoid suspicion because I wasn’t thinking like a Mafioso.
DON’T NOD OFF - THIS IS THE CRUCIAL BIT!
What’s all this misdirection business?
Up until now I have been fighting fire with fire because people best understand what has been drilled into us all along by – surprise – Qalyn, and latterly Orr, which is that the voting record is the most important thing in working out who the Mafia are. But they’re wrong. There’s another, massive clue that the mafia have left us, and Orr and Qalyn have been very cleverly steering any of us away from taking more than a cursory glance at it.
The quickness of the hand deceives the eye, villagers. Let’s have a look at the pattern of murders.
The first murder - Tez – I am tempted to think was sheer bloody blind luck on the part of the mafia. It was extremely early days then and unless Tez had tried to hint that he was a detective in PMs and either Qalyn or Orr had heard about/received one (or picked up the ratcatcher clue – lolita thought that meant Tez must have been mafia, but the real mafia would have known this wasn’t the case) I don’t think they could have got on to him so early.
But who is the Mafia going to frame? There’s the rub … but wait! On p1/2 Lolita makes a few comments about Tez being more than he seems – her words are quoted out of context by Orr, (sorry I can’t link to them but if you have a gander you’ll see I’m right) but she is clearly hinting that he is Mafia. We have our first patsy. And then – what a gift! On page 2 Tez is rather patronising and unpleasant towards Bengali. She reacts without rancour, but if the Mafia needed a trumped-up motive they already have two people who might reasonably be framed. If either of them actually were mafia it would make the worst sense in the world to kill Tez, especially as there were so many other people to choose from. Why not kill Iszabelle and make Orr look bad?
The second murder – Lionheart – there were a lot of people who were totally surprised by this one, myself included. Why kill Lionheart? He’s hardly even been playing and his loss didn’t affect the village significantly. It was clearly a move designed to give nothing away about who the mafia were and how they were working.
I was pretty safe that night because of the crack I made about Qalyn – who immediately said that the best thing for the mafia to do if they wanted to frame him would be to kill me – thus attempting to divert suspicion had the mafia decided they did want to kill me that night after all. But big whoop, I survived, as it was clearly deemed too risky to cark me this early on. As ever, the mafia will try to get the village to do it dirty work for them.
And then I remembered – and so will Orr if he’s honest – that I had mentioned in conversation (and possibly in PM) that of all the people remaining in the village the only one I would be prepared to trust apart from BC would be Lionheart. I can’t prove this, but as far as Orr know I might have come out and put forward my theory that Lionheart was innocent at any time, thus provideding the villagers – if they agreed wit me – with another point of certainty. Which is not nice for the mafia at all.
My logic was simple and possibly flawed in the sense that I didn’t know how grant had chosen the mafia, but:
If I were grant I would not deny myself the pleasure of choosing the mafia
If I were grant I would not allow people to be mafia twice in a row
Lionheart was mafia in the last round
Therefore Lionheart wasn’t mafia, as far as I, WP, was concerned. If I had had to trust anyone completely apart from BC it would have been him.
NB – If I were grant I would also get a perverse pleasure out of making someone who was a detective in the last game play as a villain in this one. Sax wasn’t available, so Qalyn it was …
The third murder: BC
On page 10 Orr reminds everyone re: BC’s killing that “Everyone was aware of how much BC had wound Whisky up by that point and she was probably letting off steam”. It’s certainly true that BC was starting to irritate the hell out of me, but that would have been just about the worst motive for killing him. The mafia work tactically, not emotionally. Maybe everyone was aware that I didn’t like him, or maybe they weren’t until Orr so kindly brought it to their attention, but either way I had managed to make myself the perfect third framee by having a public spat with BC on the thread.
In private, as Qalyn might remember, when I still believed BC to be the doctor and Q to be innocent, I had begged Q to try and shut BC up because he was making himself a very good mafia target by accusing pretty much everyone he could think of. His death could not have been attributed to any one accusee, until I got so annoyed by the way he – as the village’s only innocent – was acting irresponsibly and basically begging to be hit – that I had a go. Iszabelle too wasn’t thrilled by BC’s posturing, but I was the one who really let it get to me and thus made myself the mafia’s third target.
Let’s not forget the very florid manner in which his death was described. Stomach scooped out, testicles cut off …. It’s all a bit grand guignol for me, not to mention a bit Lorena Bobbitt. Even if, in Bizarro World, I had decided to kill BC for no good tactical reason at all, I would certainly not have made it look like a ball-breaking anti-male Femafia hit.
And lo and behold, the round after BC’s death, who is suddenly the new accusee? Of course I’m going to look guilty if you’ve just fucking framed me, Orr! I’m just lucky your scheme backfired at least partly and you were revealed as the most likely author of BC’s death scene.
I know this is a hell of a lot to read and absorb, but hey, I’ve nearly finished. Unlike Orr I don’t have all day every day to devote to this bloody game. And I have to say that I am unwilling to accuse anyone of being the third Mafioso, but I’m actually not surprised it’s hard to figure out.
Having pointed everyone so hard towards the voting patterns the mafia would have made damn sure that there wasn’t anything incriminating to see – and I imagine the third Mafioso was told to lie low. Perhaps they are even among those accused by Orr, although I doubt the mafia would take that kind of risk unless they had to.
For various reasons at various times Bengali, Iszabelle and lolita all look guilty to me, but fortunately I don’t have to accuse any one of them, because we only need to kill one mafia, and as far as I’m concerned we’ve got two to choose from.
You know who they are. |
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