Tigers are now ahead.
My guess is that the super option that unlocks halfway through tends to overlap a bit more with community participation that’s aware it’s a trap.
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The clues are coming together, but I wonder.
Something about this reminds me of the King of Cats, and all that entailed. hmm.
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Indeed.
The dreams that came along with the event make me think there was a tiger who fell in love with a Fingerking, to the disapproval of the other tigers. “Your enemy looks just like you.” “your love awaits, with a crown, and a promise.” “Only you can open the world to them.”
And felines have all sorts of titles, but the highest-ranked tiger we’ve ever heard of is the Banded Prince. The King of Cats was an entity created by a cat making a deal with Fingerkings
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A warning, be it a bug or intentional:
Visiting the sideshows in the Tournament of the Body take a full action unlike the sideshows in the previous tournaments which could be more easily observed.
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I’m spending my actions warning my fellow Londoners about the games, now.
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Speaking of it: has anybody checked with html wizardry whether any hidden numbers change when we warn the public? That ominous message about something changing appears but that also appears when donating to poor-houses and I assume it’s a character-based tracker, not a world quality.
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This now appears to be fixed and does not take a full action. Thanks, Failbetter!
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You are right. You can find this in your character scrapbook options where it’s named “Adrift on a Sea of Misery”.
They’re fairly consistent with marking world qualities as such when you mouse over them, if you’re on a system where that’s easy to do (i.e. not using your finger on a touch screen).
There are some personal qualities that are hidden from both story update notices and your scrapbook. I don’t know if any world qualities are hidden; how would we know if there were?
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“There are no cheers, no slapping of backs. Only sombre contemplation, and silent tears that drip into the iron vessels carried by every warrior of Skite.”
Talk about wet blankets!
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Right, given that the Dream of the Tigers’ enemy is a bunch of Snakes that eventually take on the appearance of a once-beloved Tiger, the Tiger King being a Fingerking-possessed Tiger would make sense.
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So I reckon there is a love-hate triangle relationship between these three:
Cats - Tigers - Snakes (Fingerkings).
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Tournament of Body. Let’s support the Skite, because novelty and both Tigers and Tomb Colonies have each already won a previous tournament.
Total shutout for those Khaganate bastards!
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“I know you think you’re helping.”
Luv, I know I very much am not!
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Whilst I feel uncertain about your avowed dislike for our cross-sea brethren, I must agree on the Skite. We need someone competent to join us the Sixth Coil, and no warriors are finer than the folk of Skite!
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That reminds me: is it the first we hear of Skite?
Frustration of tigers is so sweet, we should put them on the pedestal again.
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They’ve been in some Fate-Locked Elder Continent stuff, and one of the Estival items is related to them. (the Epicurean Helm, if I remember correctly) Their gimmick is that they can’t heal any of their wounds, despite living quite close to the Mountain, due to a curse of some kind. And if they win, maybe all that will be elaborated on! GO SKITE!
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So they don’t know we know, despite Huffam’s office becoming a hub of particularly intense journalistic activity. And they also seem to not have rigged the game from the start. And they did participate in 3/4 tournaments. Interesting.
The Striped Officiant doesn’t specify who we think we’re helping by making the tigers win, though.
Putting the pieces together : The Sixth Coil contains a tiger who has been posessed by fingerkings, probably the King of Tigers. The Tigers have to open the coil for some reason. In a slightly different reading from the one in the first paragraph then: the Striped Officiant meant that the player character thinks they’re helping London by spiting the tigers and we are wrong in this belief because the Tigers consider themselves least prepared to face their former King? The way I get it that could tie it all together. They didn’t bother organising this whole shebang just to sacrifice some random Neathy creatures to whatever scary thing is in there. They actually wanted a great team to defeat the evil within the Sixth Coil?
I just wanted to also give credit for my theory above to many other posters, the one with the ideas closest to mine being waterpls here.
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Mmmh… That’d fit if one of the contests wasn’t “how good are you at giving shape to your imagination”. Though given the nature of Parabola, that may well prove to be the most important one.
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What I can’t for the life of me figure out is why Surface spies would think they stand to gain anything? I am thinking in particular of that Dutch spy who was instructed to steal whatever’s in the Sixth Coil. Maybe they really didn’t know what was going on?