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Why hello there, handsome. I see you have a new photo!
So as promised last night, here is the first part of the Saga of New Tartan. I'm going to tell a pretty long story, so I hope you and Troy don't mind if I copy-paste bits of it to both of you.
The best way I can think of to describe this to you is to hearken back to the family visit of Survivor: Amazon, when all the loved ones sit down for a picnic. The great Rob Cesternino sits down next to his mom and the first thing out of his mouth is, "I've been a bad boy, mom."
So...I've been a bad girl, guys. smile.gif
My first thought as soon as I landed on the new tribe: gotta get in the majority. You may recall that prior to the game I'd chatted a lot with Andrea and Penny. (I think when I was fearful of a swap right before we went into the dungeon, I told you guys to seek them out.) I'd chatted slightly less (but still enough) with Cochran and Lill, and I'd chatted pretty much not at all with Eliza and Dawn, so it seemed like the best plan was the one you guys started out with -- Ex-Galloways and Ex-Somerleds come together to take out everyone else. Rocky, Cochran, Lill, and I agreed that first morning that we needed to stick together for as long as we were in the clan together after I pointed out that there were four of us here and four of you over there, and we could just get rid of everyone else. (Yes, I understand that would put us in a minority at final 8, but a lot could happen between now and then, I figured...and indeed it has, but I'll get to that.)
We talked it over a bit and it was pretty clear to everyone that Kenny was playing the game really, really hard, so we decided to blindside him. No muss, no fuss.
And then Kenny pretty much confirmed we were making the right decision. Here's the other thing that was going on at this time -- while we were in the dungeon, I was running some really basic, really dumb experiments. I kept posting pictures of dungeons with pithy little comments about, like, bread and water. (Or like, Princess Vespa from Spaceballs singing in the dungeon.) And I kept not getting marked. Obviously if we could have private-messaged, I'd have had you guys to bounce this off of but I don't think anybody even even noticed or suspected that I was trying anything. No idea if I was right or not, but Brobst did say it was something really simple, and nobody else was doing what I was doing. And then Kenny posted a photo of a dungeon. I couldn't tell if he had caught on to what I was trying, so the VERY FIRST thing I wanted to know when I could message him was...well, had he?
I recognize now that I took this sort of cutesy conspiratorial tone that could be construed to mean I was trying to do that super-aggressive Matt-style gameplay, but instead of writing back, "wow, cool, what did you try?" Kenny's first response was to go to every single other member of the clan to tell them that I was being shady and keeping secrets and he wanted me out. I guess at this stage of the game you're just looking for reasons to target people, so I don't fault him that much. And anyway, I had, by that point, already made the connection with the Somerleds and they saw the logic in blindsiding Kenny (plus maintaining a majority up until -- and probably through -- the merge). It was also easy to fix my reputation for being a shady secret-keeper: I just told everyone I wanted to align with what he was on about, in great detail. (And eventually I told everyone the alleged secret EXCEPT him. That's what you get, Kenny!)
But Kenny, Eliza, and Dawn were so smug about their absolute certainty that I was getting unanimously voted out that they pretty much shut me out. None of them asked me who I was voting for, none of them even offered a bullshit decoy story. I sent Dawn a quick message a few hours before the vote saying, "I think I know how the vote's going down and I'm just going to say that if you consider not voting for me, I'd try to make it up to you." Just to see if she was willing to consider switching a vote, or if she even remotely cared what I was up to. She took this as scrambling and forwarded it around to everyone to giggle at...which kind of tells me something about her character, I guess. Now, in fairness, I was messaging Lill, Cochran, and Rocky with a lot more expediency than the other three, but that's because I was trying to play the game from an iPhone using public wifi. I can see why they thought I'd be an easy boot. They probably thought I was completely expendable -- if I wasn't trying to get something going with them, I obviously wasn't trying to get something going with anybody, I guess.
So the vote goes down without a hitch. 3 votes me, 4 votes Kenny. Eliza and Dawn are FURIOUS with everyone, though neither of them seem to be that upset with me. Both start coming to me with various complex plans. Eliza, to her credit, actually did consider that I might not just be tagging along, and asked ME what WE were thinking, and although things were a little contentious at first, we did clear the air. Dawn, on the other hand, came at me with 12 paragraphs of complicated planning. She said she could get a girls' alliance going with Kim and Andrea, and that I could tag along if I wanted. Gee, thanks. (She also continued to bash me to everyone else, telling them it was really shady that I kept "deleting messages," i.e., not quoting them back when I replied, mostly because it was really easy to screw up the formatting when I was doing it on my phone.)
(I have to admit I was kind of snarky when I rejected her plan. I regret this a little. It was uncalled for.)
Dawn was, most definitely, going to be the next one out if we went to Clan Council. None of the four of us trusted her and we were still trying to decide if it was useful to bring in Eliza. (Though we never got to that point, it was a useful conversation to have because it came up again after the swap.)
So that's chapter one. Coming next, probably this afternoon: Episode Two: Attack of the Fairplay.