Vev
Part four begins! We return to matters roughly as they stood at the end of part 2.
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Look at those faces. Glenn and Claire are fully aware that that’s not Lottie, Dean is completely oblivious to that fact, and Not- Lottie (Nottie, yet another name for her) is gloating.
She’s not the Lottie, she’s a very Nottie girl.
Everything sounds like a double entendre with Evilottie, and not the fun kind. Now I’m worried she’s killed a second time already.
I read that as referring to the fact that there are three people present who she could kill- Claire, Glenn, and Dean.
Is it too late to suggest “Charlottan”?
Nice one!
Duplottie?
The only one I know
The major problem is that they still don’t know about the, most likely poisoned, beverage she gave to Dean
In a surprise twist, they brought in a decoy Claire too. You can tell because the fake doesn’t lisp, she stutters.
Glom’s deer-in-the-headlights stare reminds me of when he first met Lottie.
Yes. Shear terror.
No, that would be a sheep in the headlights.
Yeah, I caught the typo right after I posted. Ugh.
Well, he *is* from New Zealand
Where is that fancy bottle? Ah there, seems like nobody drank more from it. Claire and Glen still seem to be fine.
omg. omg.
It’s in the upper left corner! About 3/4 full
indeed. Well, the night is still young.
Meanwhile I got another idea: What if the poison has 2 components? One could in the bottle. Very likely. The other could be anywhere, even in a spray that Nottie could spray in their faces.
Maybe Dean didn’t drink from that bottle but that would be too much luck.
Right after hay!
(Not sure if I spelled it right for Scrabble purposes, but that’s how you pronounce it)
Little known fact, in Part Two Gary Glitter’s singing about the fifth letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Scrabble fan that I am, I’m imagining the tiles at the top of the page arranged on a board together.
N
I
G
H
T
LAST
I’m going to have to challenge NIGHTL
Dang. It lined up as NIGHTS in the compose box, but the leading spaces were removed when it posted. Ah, well.
I am puzzled. If I remember correctly a “Bingo” is awarded after using all 7 letters. You also have to connect with the existing letter structure. ANALOGS is indeed 7 letters but you would need at least one to connect, so 7 letters for an at least 8 letter word. Was this perhaps meant to be ANALOGUES? Or maybe eLottie is flim-flamming Claire.
If anyone’s reply involves the word hamper, I will have to go over in the corner and keep quiet.
She appears to have played alongside an existing word, forming a second two-letter word down with the first A.
I’m seeing a couple other problems, though. Firstly, what appears to be her word starts only six squares from the edge, so the S would be hanging off the edge of the board. And if you nudge it over a square so it fits, that puts the first A on a double letter, so, with the double word under the O, ANALOGS works out to (1*2 + 1+1+1+1+2+1)*2 + 50 == 68 points. And the down word also gets the doubled A, so it’s worth at least 2 points, even if the other letter is a blank, for a total of at least 70.
Or, hmm, maybe one of the other 1-point letters is actually a blank. That would make ANALOGS 66 points, and the down word could be AA, AN, AT, or AS, which, with the doubled A, would give the other three points.
You know, this kind of thing is the reason Conan Doyle never shows up for seances anymore.
Too lazy to verify the double letter score space under the A, but your analysis sounds good up until you get to what the two-letter word could be. As A appears to be the second letter, only AA of the options you mentioned would work. NA, TA, and LA are the other possibilities.
I was assuming the bottom of the board was towards us, so it’d be A?. If it’s towards Nottie, it’d be ?A, towards Claire ?S, and away from Nottie, S?. It’s probably possible to tell the actual orientation from the row of boxes on the edge, but neither of our ancient boards are that style, so I wasn’t sure. The board layout is rotationally symmetrical (as well as both orthogonally and diagonally), so it doesn’t change anything else.
I hope you realise how much this discussion is going to cost you all in hampers
That’s never stopped them before.
It’s never hampered them?
One each?
H A M P E R S is only worth 14 points before the 50 point bonus for using all seven letters though
Did… did you just do it wrong, then explain what was done wrong? Are you deceiving us? Is Beate? What’s going on here, I’m scared and confused.
In a surprising twist, the two Johns here are actually *not* doppelgangers. I think. Or…?
I did wonder what HAMPERS is good for, on a double word score. Now that you mention it.
HAMPERS on a double word score would be (4+1+3+3+1+1+1)*2=28 points, assuming no other score modifiers and that it’s using a tile that has already been played (so that it’s not a bingo). If it’s the first play, it would get double word score and bingo, for 78 points.
Turns out that EviLottie revenge plan consisted on delivering a set of crushing defeats at scrabble to those close to Lottie.
The falling bricks two chapters ago were just a coincidental construction accident.
I’m sorry, but anyone that obsesses that much about Scrabble is by definition evil.
Claire and Glenn seem concerned and it’s easy to see why. Lottie is totally involved in scrabble and probably her voice sounds weird. Evilottie is so sure they all are going to die that her efforts in acting like Lottie are the bare minimum.
While I don’t disagree with this interpretation, she’s always had those scratchy speech bubbles. It’s the Evil Prince Ludwig the Indestructible problem: no matter how superb a master of disguise she may be, she can’t just get the voice right.
The popular bug is trapped with the wasp
don’t worry a STING HALT has been arranged
She must really love that pink puffer!
What I want to know is, why are they playing two two-person games, instead of one four-person game?
Ugh Alaric UGH
To reduce the number of turns paused and players enraged when some pedant (naming no names) demands the dictionary be checked?
The combination of Dean Thompson and fake Lottie produces a maelstrom of baleful psychic energy, characterized by poor group dynamics.
Because they had two Scrabble boards, presumably
Ah man. The words I learned you can use. Is it TAV or TAU? Or BOTH?
3 intrepid adventurers, 2 with street/bar fighting experience, wrestling, etc.
vs.
I Charlottan with a wobbly head.
Where is the cosh?
My Aunt was a Scrabble daemon. She had house rules: No two or three letter words allowed, and dirty words counted double.
I never did get to use “callipygian”
No 2-letter words? The tiles must have spread to the edges of the board pretty fast without the ability to do a word alongside another.
Dunno. I refused to play with her.
My family’s house rules on two- and three-letter words sounds similar, but we have three exceptions: 1. there is a main word that is at least four letters long (e.g. playing TO on NIGH to make the main word NIGHT is fine); 2. the point value of the play is at least ten (e.g. ZA); 3. you can’t get back to seven tiles at hand at the end of the play (no more / not enough tiles to draw from).
Sounds like reasonable rules.
In high school I used to play Scrabble with my friend Frank using the entire Oxford English Dictionary. The number of absurd Old English two-letter words was astounding
I’ve been playing solitaire Old English Scrabble as a vocabulary-building exercise, using Clark Hall as the Scrabble dictionary. The main thing I’ve learned is that I shouldn’t be allowed to play Scrabble without someone else to mitigate my Tendencies. I keep ending up with these clumps that look like newspaper crosswords that follow the double-word diagonals, until I don’t have anywhere left that I can hang anything.
You’re a “zig zag builder” John, Lottie complains about them in an earlier comic
Looking at this page again after getting some sleep, I suddenly wondered, do we know which Lottie is depicted on the Pt 4 cover? The puffer on this page matches the cover puffer fairly well, and Skellottie was looming over both Lottie and Beate (and Claire) in the Pt 3 cover.
I was wondering that, as well. I suppose we’ll find out.
The puffer on the cover has the classic Lottie horizontal seams, while Nottie’s on this page has diamond seams.
Beate me to it
The puffer on the cover is the jacket with a placket;
A blazer with a razor is the coat for a Grote.
The puffer pattern had been addressed before in a Pt 2 comment: https://badmachinery.com/comic/a-creature/#comment-6280
Realottie: horizontal stitch
Noncharlotte: diamond stitch
But I still like the idea! DemetriosX pointed out the cover scene might refer to page title “ploop”. Since there’s an “I’ll be you” earlier, who knows which one will be wearing which jacket … when?
Beate’s grasp of English must be pretty good for her to thrash the others, even if they are psychologically disadvantaged by her presence
Her impersonation is “studied,” after all.