Not Again! With Magnus

[shortforever]

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Comments

[ruffboi]

I dunno! I didn't kill Sanji or anybody, and I didn't use my power last week, so I couldn't tell ya. Look, I can prove it.

[Holding out the identical hand, though. There's a fresh cut from Reaper's Game on that same finger.]

Oh. [He seems a little unsure? Because it's just an open cut, which he definitely didn't have at trial last week.] That's too bad, you can't see the old injury 'cause of this fresh cut over it from Reaper's Game. But I did have a cut on that finger from the trial where 3PO died. I stuck my hand in his head. If I'd used my power, you'd definitely have noticed the shape of it, 'cause it was pretty distinctive!

[shortforever]

Uh...huh...

['listen to what people aren't saying'. Right. He's got to remember that people have to talk in circles here to keep from getting punished.]

Alright, I believe you. You definitely didn't use your power last week.

But I should share my power with you too, yeah? A fair trade and all.

My power lets me hit punch someone really hard, way harder than I can do on my own. But I can only do it once a week.

[ruffboi]

. . . Holy shit.

[He grins at that?]

Amazingly good power.

[shortforever]

Right? As long as I don't use it during the week, then I'm pretty safe on Thursdays. Of course, being on Purple has made me hold onto it on purpose, just in case.

[Since, you know. Purple wasn't doing so well there for a bit.]

[ruffboi]

Yeah. I was worried about you guys for a bit, but you're in the lead, now.

[Shrugging.]

That is, if you care about teams and which one wins, which I don't!

[shortforever]

Honestly? I don't care much about winning. But all it takes is one asshole who does, and suddenly members from the other two teams start dropping like flies.

[ruffboi]

Yeah. [He nods, serious.] That's true. It's a real worry, right? There's things going on here that I don't like the sound of. There's people I don't necessarily trust. But in the end, all we can do is try to all play for the same team, right?

[shortforever]

Yeah. That's why I wanna figure out what's been happening, you know? I get that there has to be one killing a week, but look at these last two weeks. It makes me feel like I'm missing something important here, because otherwise why would four and five people be dying in one night?

And for the record, if someone killed in self-defense, then I wouldn't be complaining about that. But the fact that someone else was one of those four groups in one night to go 'oh hey, let's kill tonight'? That's what I'm talking about here.

[ruffboi]

That's an interesting question, huh? Wonder why it happened like that?

[Just sort of watching Chuuya, casual.]

I think figuring that out might be pretty important. The more people who decide to be the one to kill tonight, the more danger we're in, huh?

[shortforever]

Yeah. It's too bad we can't go back and ask the dead what they were thinking there. And it's too bad the living can't exactly say 'why' either.

[ruffboi]

Yeah. But what I have to believe is - we only got so much time left to figure things out, right?

[At least, if the length of all their previous games is any indication.]

So the clock is ticking. But the more people who die, the faster that count down, don't you think?

Maybe it has to be one, so our job needs to be to solve why last week it was four and the week before was five.

[shortforever]

You know, I hadn't even considered that time might be a factor. I thought the game would keep going until we either found a way out or until one team was left.

[He would vastly prefer the former.]

What do you think will happen if we run out of time without finding a solution?

[ruffboi]

I don't know.

[Frowning.]

I don't got any kind of special insight. I just know that if we are gonna make it, we need to try to work together, right?

[He goes quiet for a long minute, and then he'll say.]

The Chuuya I knew - I mean, I haven't told you one true thing about him so far. But what's true is he did a pretty good job of figuring things out. He pretty much had the major players in the game pinned a week or so in.

But what he did with that information. . . I think he regretted it, after.

[shortforever]

[I mean. He kind of knew Magnus was lying about a lot of that stuff, but he's listening now.]

What do you mean? Was it a "once he knew it, it changed how he looked at people" kind of thing?

[ruffboi]

He killed some people. Some people we, uh, both thought were pretty bad. I wasn't judging him for it -- I was more impressed he'd found them out the way he had.

[But.]

But by the end, I think he wished he hadn't.

[shortforever]

Because it's more complicated than 'good' or 'bad', right?

[Chuuya at age 15 can understand that much, at least. He still has some growing to go before he's the same Chuuya Magnus knew, but there's the start of that kind of growth in him.]

It's really easy to just say 'this person is bad, let's kill them' or 'this person would kill me, so I'll kill them first.' But that's how we get five deaths in one week, yeah?