okay, setup spec. The idea of a completely uncoordinated scum team is based off of wild speculation and Evenstar reading in way too much to day 1 posts that I don't think have some sort of deeper meaning like she seems to. The most egregious example of that is nictis's "claim." If cult + SK is too bastard to be unannounced, that seems almost more bastard. I think a far, far more reasonable and simple explanation is that there are two scum teams (or one scum team and a redirect, but I think that's less likely). As Even said herself, Occam's Razor...
Let's look at these kills.
@QTesseract is found within his quarters, a pulped mass of blood, bone shards, and grey matter where his skull used to be.
The new corpse is discovered shortly after dawn. Despite the shattered jaw and pulverized rib cage, it is still identifiable as that of Captain Orton Vastare, head of the castle guard.
The first corpse of the day is that of
@Absum , found folded in half on the floor of the hallway outside her quarters.
The first corpse is the most worrying. A member of the Castle Guard,
Geralt, lying on the floor of his trashed quarters with his head facing the wrong direction. He's almost thought to be one of the kingdom's men, before someone notices the symbol of the
Bloodletter Brotherhood tattooed on one leg.
These are all flavored consistently. They're all brute strength killings. You
might be able to argue that kills 3 & 4 are different from 1 & 2 on account of less smashing and more folding/twisting, but I think it's close enough that it's pretty consistent. Let's look at Nictis and LttL's flavor.
The day draws to an end, and the crowd murmurs ominously, closing in on their chosen victim. When it becomes apparent that Lysander Roth will not be leaving alive, he sighs and straightens his suit, saying his final piece.
Then he explodes.
The form of the aged butler is torn to shreds as another figure erupts from within the suit of skin, throwing itself at the crowd and burrowing into their ranks like an arrow into a wound. All anyone can glimpse are flashes of claws and fangs and sun-bronzed muscle as the monster rips its way through the ranks of the soldiers, before eventually dropping from the dozens of wounds it sustained during its rampage.
Cautiously, the corpse is approached and examined. They prove to be one of the half-beast savages from the far south, which would normally raise questions as to "what the fuck is it doing here?", but the sigil of the Bloodletter Brotherhood etched into its flesh answers that question quite handily. It seems somebody left an assassin running around without calling them off.
For LttL, we've got one 'half-beast savage' that explodes out of the 'suit of skin.' In combat, it's described as using its claws and fangs. It 'rips through the ranks.' We've got no mention of claw or bite marks, no lacerations whatsoever. LttL does not match the kill flavor.
In Addition: Even if you believe that NK 1 & 2 were done by a different person than 3 & 4, LttL was lynched
Day 2. There's no way they killed that night, they were dead. So, in conclusion,
LttL did not kill this game.
The first corpse is the most worrying. A member of the Castle Guard,
Geralt, lying on the floor of his trashed quarters with his head facing the wrong direction. He's almost thought to be one of the kingdom's men, before someone notices the symbol of the
Bloodletter Brotherhood tattooed on one leg.
Nictis is flavored as being a member of the Castle Guard. He's an undercover agent of the Bloodletter Brotherhood. This is more debatable, but I see nothing here that indicates he'd be killing this brutally. Reminder:
Cautiously, the corpse is approached and examined. They prove to be one of the half-beast savages from the far south, which would normally raise questions as to "what the fuck is it doing here?", but the sigil of the Bloodletter Brotherhood etched into its flesh answers that question quite handily. It seems somebody left an assassin running around without calling them off.
The 'Bloodletter Brotherhood' are known to us as
assassins. He's indistinguishable (beyond the tattoo) from the rest of the Guard. I wager that he's like a passive Godfather that only applies to himself, i.e. if a cop checked him he'd show up Town. If the captain of the guard (naminani iirc) was a cop, it'd make sense that a fellow guardsman would pass their check. LttL was similarly hidden - he literally wore a suit of skin as a disguise. The kills we've seen aren't assassinations, they aren't 'half-beast' attacks, they aren't done with a blade. They're, in a word,
barbaric. As in, the barbarians of Reim. I've said myself they might be a red herring, but at this point I think it lines up too well and i need to commit. On top of that, it was nictis who died, so unless he both targeted Cyri
and was retargeted to himself (which we don't even know Cyri could do, and only
if he's actually being truthful about his role), there's no way he made that kill. All in all, I don't believe nictis killed this game. I believe all four kills were done by a yet unflipped faction of barbarians.
I think, given how it seems like Nictis had info about Evenstar's QT, that his goal was to infiltrate their QT or kill her (or both, maybe with infiltrating resulting in a kill). He was clearly trying to get in her good graces. From that perspective, he swung the lynch onto LttL to build up more town credit. That's a rather risky play, no matter what the reason, and it's why I believe that there are two teams. The roleblocker is pretty likely to be scum, something i think we can pretty much all agree on at this point, especially since they haven't claimed. They were also repeatedly blocking Evenstar, which threw a big wrench into Nictis's plan. Now, it's
possible that a kill could've been redirected into nictis, but at this point I think it's
more likely that the other scum team (with the RBer) either bought into Nictis's lie and killed him thinking he was actually the VIP, or somehow saw through his ruse, although honestly I feel like the former is more likely. Note how the killer(s) seemed to be waiting until they killed the doc until they targeted nictis. They waited to kill him until after Absum died, and didn't immediately go for him when he 'revealed' himself.
I think we've got one traditional maf team in the form of the barbarians and one nonstandard scum team in the for of the Bloodletter Brotherhood. A lot of things line up for that. There's a possibility that the killer is an SK that can also RB, but I think that's less likely. I'm choosing to believe DG's claim over Pyrros's because of my previous reasoning, as well as because the way in which Pyrros defended themselves read as sus to me, with trying to keep the 'we're all town and there's a redirector' option on the table. Feels like they're trying to stay on everyone's good side. Also, looking back over their posting, I don't have a scum read on DG beyond a tone one. I'm choosing to believe the potential PR with a decently believable claim over the person claiming VT. This post is probably my final amount of big effort I'm going to put in for today because I still need to do more work and honestly trying to play this game is just stressing me out at this point. I don't have the energy to be doing much more backreading. I don't have much (if any) confidence left in me either about my ability to read people.
