The Dragon’s a well-kept young man with blue-green, vigilant eyes. His smile, too, is tidy and practiced—designed to put someone at ease even as he scalds them with a cold critique.
“Snake, you know what this means, right? Between the two of us, one of us has to be a lying wolf.”
“Yes, I understand. Since there’s only supposed to be one seer in this game, and I also said that I was one...”
And I don’t like it. The problem is that I’ve role-swapped with scraggly hoodie boy, and I don’t know who the wolf really is between the Dragon and the Rat. Everyone else, meanwhile, thinks there’s a wolf between myself and the Dragon instead.
But if I stop pretending to be Seer then the Rat might push for Lily’s death; the girl in question leans forward, lips twisted with irritation:
“I don’t get it. Why would a wolf pretend to be seer? Could someone have just made a mistake?” Lily wonders aloud.
“The Seer is the strongest villager, the sole source of true information; if the wolves can’t kill the seer to stop that flow, the next best thing is to have one of their own pretend to be one. This will cause the real seer’s information to go from unquestionable truth to murky and dubious,” the Rat kindly explains.
The Rat… that freakin’ stupid Rat!!
He makes me want to just die, die, die, die! He so casually explained the game to a girl he had also just threatened to die, die, die, die, die!!! And just when I thought I could finally chart my own path through the game, he hijacks it, but there’s an easy way to solve “complications” like him, isn’t there? It’s simple; all I need to do is make him d—
“ —Dubious or not, each seer should at least have a report, right?” Lily says.
The room’s darkness lifts away. Before, the dim light had seemed to strangle the chamber, and now it merely deadens it—the place now feels like a magnificent courtroom where we’re discussing a littering fee, perhaps, or a parking ticket.
“That’s right,” the Dragon says. “I checked the Tiger and found out that she’s part of the village.”
“See? Who’s a sweet little angel? It’s me! It’s gotta be me!” The Tiger shouts.
“Y-You’re hurting my ears…” the Pig murmurs back.
“ Not as much as you, whiny porkass!”
“I woke up around 1AM,” the Dragon interrupts, as the two students bicker behind him. “The Cat God told me to scan my Card into a device in a maintenance room, and turn a dial so it points at a certain animal—I pressed one with a Tiger icon, and after a minute, my Card displayed a village symbol.”
“Yuri, um, Snake, how about you? Who did you check?” Lily asks.
“Ah yes, the person I checked… that’s right…” I mutter.
The Rat folds his hands and looks up at the domed ceiling, nonchalantly. It’d be strictly optimal for me to say that he’s innocent here, so that everyone doesn’t execute the ‘real seer’ by accident. I speak shortly and efficiently.
“I checked the Dog. She’s a villager.”
“Really?” The Rat says. “I thought you’d have checked someone else.”
It’s my turn to smirk. You can force me to claim seer, but you can’t force me to say you’re innocent. Now the healer might protect Lily, since she’s one of the four people between me, the Dragon, the Tiger, and her, on which we have information.
“Shame we still can’t trust her, though.” the Rat shrugs, frowning. “Since the Snake and the Dragon both say they’re seer, I guess we can’t really trust anyone at all.”
150:00
149:49
149:48
149:47
149:46
“Argh! It’s impossible to get more info! Even though we have two seers and two reports, we’re back where we started!” the Horse pulls at her ponytail like a girl possessed. With only ten students sitting around this table, one would think making a choice would be easy. But no one has yet to touch the voting panels floating around on our screens.
“That’s fine by me. Let’s just yell at one other for the next two hours and then we can vote someone out. But not me. I know that I’m Papa’s sweet lil angel—just like that beanstalk said!” The Tiger swings towards the Dragon, billowing her wide white sleeves.
“What do you mean, ‘just like he said?’ There’s a world where both you and the Dragon are wolves together.”
“Bullshit, Rat …” She glances at the trim, suited boy up and down, earrings jangling. “The Dragon’s not my type.”
“N-not your type?” asks the Pig.
“I thought his face fit the golden ratio,” says the Horse.
“If his face really fit the golden ratio, he’d look like a Dali… um… Horse, do you want me to tutor you when we get back?” Lily interjects.
“I’d rather teach the Tiger how to think like a normal human being instead,” the Rat sighs, and then…
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Everyone’s now standing, except for the Rabbit who still dozes half-asleep in her chair. Our speaking overlaps and echoes til one has to shout to be heard.
“T-T-Tiger, sometimes you cut people off and are too quick to sp—”
“I’m quick thinking. Not quick to speak! There’s a difference, Pig!”
“Seer this, seer that, this all gives me a headache. Why can’t people just be seer-ious?”
“You’re all just jealous of my smarts and good looks!”
“I’m free after school on Thursdays. Wait, are we even from the same city?”
“Enough!” The Dragon calls. “It wasn’t my intention for this discussion to devolve to a verbal brawl. Have we forgotten what our plan was yesterday?”
“To save everyone. To make sure that nobody dies,” Lily says, and the Dragon nods.
“The tie vote plan again?” I stare at the Rat, memorizing his uncouth face. “But that plan has the exact same problem as yesterday. If a single person votes for someone else, then that person would perish.”
And I find the Rat to be a quite interesting person. When it comes to his game sense, he’s played quite well. And he understands the social dynamics too, even if I imagine his social life and fashion sense to both be nil. But if I were to weigh his life against the girl he threatened, my answer would be quite clear…
“I don’t think it’s good for the village to tie,” the Rat says quietly, as I start to rattle off my mixture of truth and lies:
“Voting for no one might still be a good plan. If we end the trial early, we have more time to explore the building and try to escape. Curfew today seems to be in a couple hours, and I’d love to work together with everyone until then.”
At this, the Dragon nods. “I bet even the wolves would rather us all survive,” he affirms. “And adding on to what the Snake said, we want more information, right? If we wait another night, I can check the Dog and the Snake can check the Tiger.”
The Horse tilts her head, thoughtful. Then she starts as if a light bulb had flashed above her head. “I get it! Right now we don’t know anything because we can’t trust either the Dragon or the Snake’s reports on their own. The Dragon could be lying about the Tiger, and the Snake could be lying about the Dog. But if both seers agree that the Tiger and the Dog are innocent, we know that those two are villagers for sure!”
“Yes, that’s right. If we assume that at least one of us is telling the truth and we both say the same thing, then the town doesn’t need to know which one of us is telling the truth to trust that info. So, the tie plan truly is fantastic!” I nod so hard my hair falls in front of my eyes.
I also do my best to smile, and inflect my voice, up, up, up to the heavens, to a happy place. The situation’s too grim for the others to be happy, not exactly, but they’re still interested, leaning forward, half-smiles and hopeful eyes abound.
Even the Rat pulls off his hood. “I suppose that’s true. The Monkey isn’t here to stop us anymore either, so if we want to do a tie vote, we can. But Snake, are you sure about this? Tonight, the wolves could decide to kill one of the seers.”
“I’m not afraid. Your life is in far more danger than mine,” I say, staring him in the eyes.
“It’s your funeral,” he says. The Dragon nods, and the trial is seemingly over. After some various mutters and grumbles, we come together with a final, “foolproof” plan. The Rooster isn’t alive to summarize, so Lily reviews the tie method for everyone else instead.
“Dragon votes for Snake, Snake votes for Horse, Horse votes for me, I vote for the Pig, Pig votes Rat, Rat votes Ox, Ox votes Tiger, Tiger votes Dragon. Everyone got it?”
“I vote… who?”
“Me! But don’t worry Ox—this ‘ol Tiger won’t take it personally.”
“W-Will you?” the Pig stutters.
“She won’t,” I say. “She’s pretty impulsive, but not the kind of person who’d go against the group.”
Our vote should be 1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1-1. Tied, and everybody gets to survive.
However, this plan requires a great deal of trust. If a player receives just two votes they’ll be summarily executed, and someone could take advantage of this flaw to kill someone off. A traitor could switch selections and turn an enemy, a nuisance, or a political obstacle into a corpse.
I remember the Goat—how he coughed up his life, and how everyone spent precious minutes trying to revive him. I remember the Monkey—how he demanded someone’s sacrifice and was sacrificed instead, at my hands. I remember the Rooster—prim, proper, and murdered into an unrecognizable pulp. Into a puddle of ooze and blood, but no tears, not from me. Three corpses in my memory, dancing from their graves.
“And will make four,” I say to myself, as I hover my hand, to tap a three-letter name.
The blue wheel glows on the voting screen. The wheel itself has been sliced into twelve segments, each with a word and an animal, or a single bright red X, and I glance up, my eyes meeting the Rat’s for the last time. He’s a shady, crazy shadow who will use me ruthlessly when allowed. I know also that he’s either the seer or a wolf, and I think he’s a madman either way.
He also likes music magazines… pancakes… and I think he’s afraid of dying too. Or he wouldn’t have bothered to ask me to swap roles at night.
He’s just another person. Just another person, that’s all he’s worth to me, and there’s some thought, some emotion, locked inside me that I can’t quite reach. It batters at its cage as it makes its soundless cries, yet even if I had the key to free it, I think the keyhole had long since rusted away. I glance at the Horse, and lower my head again.
Stupid, stupid, stupid Rat… stupid, stupid, stupid… stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid…
Votes processing… done!
Receiving 1 vote each…
Also receiving 1 vote…
Since there are no players in the sole majority, the second day’s trial is now complete.
“Yes!” The Horse says, fist pumping, with enough more than enough energy to make up for everyone else’s exhaustion. “As long as we work together, we can keep buying time.”
“That’s right,” I mutter. “As long as there’s people like you, and like Lily too.”
And as long as there are people like me? No, that can’t be right. It’s one of those thoughts that just feels wrong when it runs through my brain, like shoving a rake through some mud.
The Rat, that clever idiot, stares at me. Right as the trial room’s doors swing open, he gives me a two fingered salute.
