MAFIA 83: HALLOWE'EN IN THE TOYSHOP - GAME THREAD

[brainbomb]

##vote brainbomb
##end

[Jamiet99uk]

Day has ended

PLEASE HOLD

[Hamilton Brian]

Poor brain. I don't know why you pulled that gambit. Crazy.

So after you go, how many of you are remaining? 1 or 2?

[dargorygel]

I suppose we wont get anything out of interrogating BB

##end

I waited to vote end. But i don't want to read The Stand serially

[Jamiet99uk]

PLEASE HOLD

[Jamiet99uk]

I am out and will process this later, sorry.

[Jamiet99uk]

brainbomb- (8) Macca573*, Vecna*, SpiritoftheRadio*, dargorygel* JustAGuyNamedWill*, DemonRHK*, Hamilton Brian*, brainbomb.

FINAL VOTE COUNT.

[Jamiet99uk]

I'm on my phone because this timing was not expected.

You may just need to wait.

[Jamiet99uk]

FINAL D2 VOTE COUNT:

brainbomb (8) - Macca573*, Vecna*, SpiritoftheRadio*, dargorygel*, JustAGuyNamedWill*, DemonRHK*, Hamilton Brian*, brainbomb*.

PLEASE KEEP HOLDING

[Jamiet99uk]

Barely had the dust settled on the last wave of violence in the toyshop than the aggressive toys found themselves surprised that so much dust had settled.

Nobody has died.

Night 2 has begun.

You may post.

[brainbomb]

BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIP

June 16 - July 4,1980

“I called the doctor on the telephone,

Said doctor, doctor, please,

I got this feeling, rocking and reeling,

Tell me, what can it be?

Is it some new disease?”

—The Sylvers



“Baby, can you dig your man?

He’s a righteous man,

Baby, can you dig your man?”

—Larry Underwood


CHAPTER 1

Hapscomb’s Texaco sat on US 93 just north of Amette, a pissant four-street burg about 110 miles from Houston. Tonight the regulars were there, sitting by the cash register, drinking beer, talking idly, watching the bugs fly into the big lighted sign.

It was Bill Hapscomb’s station, so the others deferred to him even though he was a pure fool. They would have expected the same deferral if they had been gathered together in one of their business establishments. Except they had none. In Amette it was hard times. In 1970 the town had had two industries, a factory that made paper products (for picnics and barbecues, mostly), and a plant that made electronic calculators. Now the paper factory was shut down and the calculator plant was ailing—they could make them a lot cheaper in Taiwan, it turned out, just like those little portable TVs and transistor radios.

Norman Bruett and Tommy Wannamaker, who had both worked in the paper factory, were on relief, having run out of unemployment some time ago. Henry Carmichael and Stu Redman both worked at the calculator plant but rarely got more than thirty hours a week. Victor Palfrey was retired and smoked stinking home-rolled cigarettes, which were all he could afford.

“Now what I say is this,” Hap told them, putting his hands on his knees and leaning forward. “They just gotta say screw this inflation shit. Screw this national debt shit. We got the presses and we got the paper. We’re gonna run off fifty million thousand-dollar bills and hump them right the Christ into circulation.”

Palfrey, who had been a machinist until 1974, was the only one present with sufficient self-respect to point out Hap’s most obvious damfool statements. Now, rolling another of his shitty-smelling cigarettes, he said: “That wouldn’t get us nowhere. If they do that, it’l be just like Richmond in the last two years of the States War. In those days, when you wanted a piece of gingerbread, you gave the baker a Confederate dollar, he’d put it on the gingerbread, and cut out a piece just that size. Money’s just paper, you know.”

“I know some people that don’t agree with you,” Hap said sourly. He picked up a greasy red plastic paper-holder from his desk. “I owe these people. And they’re starting to get pretty itchy about it.”

Stu Redman, who was perhaps the quietest man in Amette, was sitting in one of the cracked plastic Woolco chairs, a can of Pabst in his hand, looking out the big service station window at 93. Stu knew about poor. He had grown up that way right here in town, the son of a dentist who had died when Stu was seven, leaving his wife and two other children besides Stu.

His mother had gotten work at the Redball Truck Stop just outside of Amette—Stu could have seen it from where he sat right now if it hadn’t burned down in 1969. It had been enough to keep the four of them eating, but that was all. At the age of nine, Stu had gone to work, first for Rog Tucker, who owned the Red Ball, helping to unload trucks after school for thirty-five cents an hour, and then at the stockyards in the neighboring town of Braintree, lying about his age to get twenty backbreaking hours of labor a week at the minimum wage.

Now, listening to Hap and Vic Palfrey argue on about money and the mysterious way it had of drying up, he thought about the way his hands had bled at first from pulling the endless handtrucks of hides and guts. He had tried to keep that from his mother, but she had seen, less than a week after he started. She wept over them a little, and she hadn’t been a woman who wept easily. But she hadn’t asked him to quit the job. She knew what the situation was. She was a realist.

Some of the silence in him came from the fact that he had never had friends, or the time for them. There was school, and there was work. His youngest brother, Dev, had died of pneumonia the year he began at the yards, and Stu had never quite gotten over that. Guilt, he supposed. He had loved Dev the best ... but his passing had also meant there was one less mouth to feed.

In high school he had found football, and that was something his mother had encouraged even though it cut into his work hours. “You play,” she said. "‘If you got a ticket out of here, it’s football, Stuart. You play. Remember Eddie Warfield.” Eddie Warfield was a local hero. He had come from a family even poorer than Stu’s own, had covered himself with glory as quarterback of the regional high school team, had gone on to Texas A&M with an athletic scholarship, and had played for ten years with the Green Bay Packers, mostly as a second-string quarterback but on several memorable occasions as the starter. Eddie now owned a string of fast-food restaurants across the West and Southwest, and in Amette he was an enduring figure of myth. In Amette, when you said “success,” you meant Eddie Warfield.

Stu was no quarterback, and he was no Eddie Warfield. But it did seem to him as he began his junior year in high school that there was at least a fighting chance for him to get a small athletic scholarship . . . and then there were work-study programs, and the school’s guidance counselor had told him about the NDEA loan program.

Then his mother had gotten sick, had become unable to work. It was cancer. Two months before he graduated from high school, she had died, leaving Stu and his brother Bryce to support. Stu had turned down the athletic scholarship and had gone to work in the calculator factory. And finally it was Bryce, three years’ Stu junior, who had made out. He was now in Minnesota, a systems analyst for IBM. He didn’t write often, and the last time he had seen Bryce was at the funeral, after Stu’s wife had died—died of exactly the same sort of cancer that had killed his mother. He thought that Bryce might have his own guilt to carry . . . and that Bryce might be a little ashamed of the fact that his brother had turned into just another good old boy in a dying Texas town, spending his days doing time in the calculator plant, and his nights either down at Hap’s or over at the Indian Head drinking Lone Star beer.

The marriage had been the best time, and it had only lasted eighteen months. The womb of his young wife had borne a single dark and malignant child. That had been three years ago. Since, he had thought of leaving Amette, searching for something better, but smalltown inertia held him—the low siren song of familiar places and familiar faces. He was well liked in Amette, and Vic Palfrey had once paid him the ultimate compliment of calling him “Old-time tough.”

As Vic and Hap chewed it out there was still a little dusk left in the sky, but the land was in shadow. Cars didn’t go by on 93 much now, which was one reason Hap had so many unpaid bills. But there was a car coming now, Stu saw.

It was still a quarter of a mile distant, the day’s last light putting a dusty shine on what little chrome was left to it. Stu’s eyes were sharp and he made it as a very old Chevrolet, ’59 or ’60. A Chevy, no lights on, doing no more than fifteen miles an hour, weaving all over the road. No one had seen it yet but him.

“Now let’s say you got a mortgage payment on this station,” Vic Palfrey was saying, “and let’s say it’s fifty dollars a month.”

[Jamiet99uk]

For the bot:
DAY HAS ENDED.

[SpiritoftheRadio]

SKELETAL ARMOUR - A spooky-looking armoured breastplate and a skull helmet. Protects against one killing attempt and is then destroyed. (There are up to TWO sets of armour at the start of the game).

REPLACEMENT SKULL - If a player with this item is daykilled, they will not die, resulting in a no-kill that day.

So Brain had one of these

[brainbomb]

somehow

palpatine survived

[Hamilton Brian]

Holy shit!

What devilry?

[Jamiet99uk]

For the bot:

Day has ended

[ND]

Not good. Not good at all.

[ND]

Don't bother coaching your idiot scumbag pal Will, Brain. As soon as we vote you off he is next.

[Hamilton Brian]

Knowing that they had the item to prevent a daykill makes it easier to play that gambit.

Just brought us to the night quicker and losing one more town tonight.

I can't decide if it was a good idea to hammer the day or not.

Maybe this night needs to be a bit of a quieter one and we go back to looking at patterns and anything resembling a crumb or slip. Put together a file and file it before EoN?

[ND]

I think that is a valid suggestion Hamilton.