Ninety was drunk.
You don't have an excuse.
For what was unquestionably the sorriest mission so far.
I'll admit, this was a difficult one. I thought after the ease with which you guys took down "The Garage Sale", it was time for a more advanced challenge. One that transparently put newer members (like
Belle, who wasn't even around yet!) at a disadvantage, although the use of this topic to publicly share questions and answers
did serve to buffet that problem to some degree. But not enough to redeem the team's overall forgetfulness about the winners they'd elected just half a year before. Christ: you'd think the Lugiasian Awards didn't
mean anything, or something.
Though
the Vault now lies open, no would-be Antonio Sharpe managed to break in. The challenge is lost, and
30 EP go not into the team pot, but into the Mole's pocket. That's the bad news.
Here's the worse news: a further
22 EP will be siphoned
out of the team's earnings so far, and transferred to the Mole as well.
That's the combined cost of the four answers
Bulbs,
Ninety,
Biscuit and
Belle paid for out of the team pot.
This, of course -- if you didn't already realize -- was the "little twist". If you fumbled the first guess, you could pay a seemingly innocuous fee out of the team pot to secure the right answer anyway.
Ninety was the first person to submit a guess and so the first to be made such an offer. As such, he was given the cheapest deal: only
4 EP to restore the correct answer. Unfortunately, his mistake -- or else deliberate Mole move -- was to presume that the price would be fixed at
4 EP for every player. In fact, the cost rose by one with each failure, so that
Bulbs (the first player to actually
accept his deal, though the second to be offered it) paid
5 EP,
Biscuit paid
6, and
Belle paid
7, making
22 EP in total liabilities.
Even that would have been low enough to keep the challenge profitable, had you guys successfully managed to guess the remaining four answers on your own. But even though I extended the mission by an extra day so you'd have time to hash out the final four questions, I've received not a single PM about them. No one took even a stab at guessing the final four, dooming this challenge not only to failure, but to a loss from the team pot.
For the record, here were the eight questions in order, their correct answers, and the symbols they would have unlocked:
- For the first question, the winner of Best Short RP was An August Luncheon. This would have unlocked a left paren: (.
- For the second question, the winner of Smartest Member was Choobs. This would have unlocked an at symbol: @.
- For the third question, the winner of Most Infamous Member was Prime. This unlocked the letter p.
- For the fourth question, the winner of Best Board was ORP. This would have unlocked the letter r.
- For the fifth question, the winner of Most Creative Member was Lugiasian. This unlocked an exclamation point: !.
- For the sixth question, the winner of Best Protagonist was Illiana. This unlocked a hyphen: -.
- For the seventh question, the winner of Least Dedicated Member was V101. This would have unlocked the digit 9.
- For the eighth question, the winner of Best Recent RP was Obscured Truth. This unlocked the digit 1.
String all those characters together and the password would have been yours.
So who's to blame? I want to draw your attention to a few figures. First, there's
Biscuit and
Belle, the last two players to submit guesses. Now it's hard to fault
Bulbs for immediately accepting his
5 EP deal, because at that time,
Bninety hadn't yet posted
this telling post indicating that he was being offered the correct answer for
4 EP.
Biscuit and
Belle, however, behaved more unsettlingly. Even though, by the time they submitted their guesses, they'd surely already seen that post of
Ninety's, neither of them so much as flinched when offered the correct answers for more than
4 EP. They certainly didn't balk, come back to the topic, and post anything along the lines of "Hey guys, I think the price is actually increasing, we better be extra careful with our guesses from here on out." No, they both accepted their deals unhesitatingly. Perhaps the increased price escaped their notice, perhaps they assumed everyone would figure out the inflation at work on their own... or perhaps one of them is the Mole, and was deliberately trying to ramp the price up without telling the team what was going on.
Testbug and
Iron Mouse also deserve some spotlight. Both of these players posted
their questions early in the challenge -- and, more importantly, their possible answers as well. Now, neither of these players ever PMed me a guess, which is bad enough. But worse, when I
posted the four unanswered questions, complete with decoy answers, both of these players promptly clammed up. I was fully expecting
Testbug to say "Ha ha, wait but come on guys, we know the Best Short RP has to be one of these three I posted earlier!" or
Iron Mouse to do the same with Smartest Member, but neither gave so much as a peep to that effect... and sure enough, no one else seemed to have the basic intuition to check back on the previous page and rule out the decoy answers for those two questions. Is either
Testbug or
Iron Mouse the Mole, and were they trying to present a veneer of participation, only to sabotage through silence at the critical moment?
I'll tell you someone who didn't sabotage through silence, though. That's
Sem, who committed the most blatant undermining act since
Belle back in "The Thumbprint Search". Once again, as in that case, I can't dance around the issue, because it's completely unambiguous. Look back up there at which board won
Best Board. ORP, right? Obviously! ORP is the best! Whoo! Okay now look back at
the answers Sem gave.
Yes:
Sem knowingly and in cold blood faked the answers he'd been given in his original PM, substituting Fiction & Poetry (not a nominee for Best Board in 2010) in place of the correct answer, ORP. He thereby
ensured that, unless someone else had a lucid enough memory to overrule him, that someone would have necessarily guessed incorrectly for that question. It's just as well for the team that no one
did send in a guess for Best Board, as you'd have most likely ended up another
8 EP or more out of hand. It's perfectly clear that
Sem decided to take this opportunity to step up and play the bad guy. And so, once again, I must ask you: do you believe him?
Is Sem the bad guy? Or is he only trying to get your attention? Remember that no matter how many suspects you may be bouncing around at this point, there can only be one Mole.
And only the Mole could look on this challenge and call its outcome anything but unhappy. Statistically, I'm guessing it's pretty likely that you, whoever is reading this right now, don't like me very much at the moment. (You'd like me even less if I pointed out that a simple Google search for "2010 lugiasian awards", with some creative use of cached pages and omitted results, would have cracked the Vault wide open, so I'm not going to mention that.) But take heart, players. While there
will be a few more challenges down the line from which you can actually lose money, they'll be few and far between. For the most part, the only ways to go are up and not at all, and I'm sure you'll find your fortunes changing on the next challenge. It won't be as hard as this one, nor, I suppose, as easy as "The Garage Sale" -- actually it'll be partially motivated by random chance, but much more so by how you guys view each other as fellow players.
Most importantly, the final challenge of Episode 02 contains
your first ever chance to earn an exemption. In case you've forgotten, a player holding an exemption is immune to execution in that episode -- they don't even have to take the quiz! So an exemption is an indisputably lovely prize for the true contestant, although mark your fellow players well... the Mole, after all, will be just as happy to get his or her hands on an exemption, if it'll mean looking more innocent.
But the final challenge of this episode won't work if people lounge about without doing anything, which is why
I'm making this an "opt-in" challenge. You MUST post in this topic to assert your participation in the next challenge in order to be dealt in. And why not? Not only could you win the first exemption, but more participants also means more potential earnings for the pot. You'll understand soon enough.
So, opt away!
THE TEAM POT: 48 EP
THE MOLE'S POCKET: 77 EP