Last round before weekend = overworked hosts = bad blogging!
And typing up a whole summary yesterday before losing it to a forced restart didn't help...
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But a whole lot of stuff happened in this episode that deserve some mentions here!
The biggest headline is the Items found by Lucius and Oliver, with the help of Crouch and Lily respectively, and the cross-Side alliances it's fostering. By an absurd coincidence most of the Order members picked the same players to send Owl Post to in the first episode, so most of the Death Eater Side got clues. Lucius got in early trying to trade them, assemble them, and find the thing. He chose Crouch to work with, then sent Lily the full instructions in Owl Post to share with Wood. Then Lucius had to start sharing back and leading everyone else on the Side on a wild goose chase at different paces, which has added to the turmoil at Malfoy Manor.
Lily/Oliver bonding over the task and the secret has bridged the widest gap in their foursome, and diminished the influence of Fleur and Tonks on the Side generally, particularly as Grimauld Place compares notes from Owl Post and comes to realise that Hedwig's Killer is one of the few names not yet linked to Lucius. The only group chat on this Side is between Oliver/Tonks/Lily/Fleur, but while Diggle was moving away from that grouping the news from Malfoy Manor is linking them back together, even as Moody becomes a growing influence (due to his own efforts, not Pyrites' whom the Order has noted never seems to get any mention in Owl Post).
Had Malfoy Manor lost Pyrites would have been doomed, though that was not something anyone there would take for granted. Lucius convinced himself that there was a grand conspiracy against him from the first day of the game and that the stray vote against him during the Travers vote was a relic of that from somebody who didn't get the memo to switch their vote in time after Travers announced he was willing to leave. Everyone has told him this is absurd, but the best Lucius-calmers are Crouch and Karkaroff, whom Lucius is trying to draw into a foursome along with Yaxley and Crouch, so that those he trusts most can finally get on the same page - and the Lucius/Karkaroff chat is all kinds of wonderful because Karkaroff is calling Lucius on all his bullshit since the beginning, while letting Lucius believe that airing it all in the open makes them closer for having moved past it.
Meanwhile Hedwig's Killer has solidified his own grouping, with Lucius/Crouch/Yaxley/Karkaroff. Lucius is still holding him at arm's length for fear of his formidable potential, but the others have been conversing with him well. Karkaroff has tried to establish a core trio with Lucius/Crouch, and the oldest groups are becoming defunct. One of these is Pyrite's group of everyone but Killer/Karkaroff(/Travers, at the time), which other revive occasionally for fear that surely Pyrites has noticed nobody posts in it or wants to be a part of it.
The other groups are Lucius' original structures: the trio with Regulus/Rodolphus and the fivesome it spawned after Alecto failed to join as the sixth. There was some drama here this round, with Regulus/Rodolphus clocking that Lucius was shutting them out in favour of Yaxley/Crouch. They suspected it because of changes in activity levels, as Lucius focuses his efforts elsewhere, and had it more or less confirmed when Crouch accidentally copied a clue and included some lines he'd sent to a group chat, and now it's become a live issue after Regulus accidentally replied to a message from Rodolphus referring to the suspicions they'd already discussed together... in the group chat with Lucius. Once again Lucius think he's done damage control by exposing the doubt and overwhelming it with reassurances, but we'll have to wait and see how the other two feel once they get back online and messaging again.
At Grimauld Place the vote was essentially a foregone conclusion. After the momentum built to swing toward an Aberforth vote last round, and was shut down for wariness of Mundungus and/or wariness of the core four flipping the vote too obviously, Tonks and Moody kept pushing to make it happen. Kingsley was tipped off that Aberforth had been throwing his name out (as an option early on, like everyone else had been - but that wasn't made obvious to Kingsley) and also joined the campaign. As Aberforth's absences stretched out and some had gone more than a day without hearing from him, and then he didn't participate in yet another challenge those looking to defend him and his straightforward intentions (and implied straightforward loyalty toward those he interacted with properly on Day 1) found themselves without much ground to stand on.
Aberforth did tragically log in and message for the scrambling period, but by then things were locked in with multiple player having prevoted and gone to sleep. The others did an awfully (really, it felt grimy) good job of lying to his face, almost left him alone at Magical Council, and let him leave unceremoniously. Tonks even threw the Challenge in the hope of pushing this outcome through before Aberforth could show up and potentially shift the momentum back again. Lily also threw it, though I think her motivations had more to do with reassuring Crouch about her position and claiming some easy House Points through super low bids.
And right on the cusp of the next episode (see next thread!) the chaos and paranoia of the Item search began to spread from one Side to the other. Enough DEs were far enough along to send plenty of hints in their Owl Post this round, and Yaxley asked Lily to search for the thing with Diggle. And while Lucius clearly enjoys stringing people along one by one, tracking and manipulating who knows what in real time... Lily has no interest in playing that game, despite it now being thrust upon her.
Aberforth never really clicked with the pace of this Game unfortunately. I'd been hoping that a connection with Karkaroff on Day 0 would lead to some preparation for all he was to encounter in an active Side of experienced players, kind of like Lucius tried to help Wood, but alas 'twas not to be. Karkaroff wrote off his partner almost instantly, had no qualms with sharing his doubts in his PMs or Owl Post - to the point that Lucius (in the midst of paranoia over the stray vote) actively suggested in his Owl Post letter that Grimauld Place should throw the Challenge and boot Aberforth, because his name had been written down. There was never any chance of a Switch saving Aberforth. Indeed, it's taken until today for anyone to mention weaponising the twist (HK, naturally) - and I'm guessing there'll be a good deal more of that come the Swap on Sunday.
One last thing, just for the record. Apart from the ethical/strategic debate around Lily's edit of the Puffs Wikipedia page (the easiest way to find the names required for the posting task to obtain the Item), we ruled it as an ID breach due to the page retaining her IP address, and did what we could to avoid drawing further attention to this. Oliver (whom she'd boasted about it to) was told not to spread the information any further, Lily was strictly warned, and we reverted the Wiki page back to normal so that nobody would fail the task and then go snooping about to see how it went wrong... and to that end we also accepted one player's use of Lily's edited character names in the task and deemed that to have been a correct completion of the task. In-game the consequences will be that Oliver now has more reason to doubt Lily down the line, or at least wonder at the lengths to which she's willing to go, and Lucius is already upset not to have received thanks from Lily in Owl Post, as her planned letter to him had included mention of the edit so was considered invalid and not delivered.