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Attempting to Survive the Apocalypse: Dimensional Dislocation

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Rukia said:
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…well we knew this was coming. A 99% drop in human population was never going to be pretty and that was the optimistic estimate.

Seems resources are finally going to be a limiting factor. Boosting income just became a critical priority.

At least the power problems are likely solved. We can probably run the giant mech on CF.
 
As I stated before. We really fucked ourselves by not completing barracks as soon as we could.

If we had gotten the barracks done the turn we got it we wouldn't have had to rely on propaganda action to try to stay afloat. And we wouldn't be bleeding public confidence so much.

Now? We get to reap the consequences of our actions.

God this is a fucking mess.

That Nat 1 basically means we won't even reach 5 million in shelters practically.

We can't afford to delay the heavy mech anymore. Not with a actual potential class D ELID around.

Edit: reading back the quest had the fucking barracks action since before the Kipi incident yet we didn't go for it until forced to by the military. The root of our failure can be laid there. Note: I'm including myself in this. I should have pushed for barracks harder much sooner.

Edit 2: well. Now that things have turned out this way we need to salvage what we can from this bullshit.
 
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BlessedYetDamned said:
Surprised no one is commenting on that recruitment roll.
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That's because in this quest that roll's par the course. Shit's fucked and every turn we are deeper in the hole. Not getting another specialist is bad but eh. Not like this quest has given us much hope anyways.

[] Plan Shit's Fucked.
Infrastructure (6 5 Dice)
[] Military Warehouses (Stage 2) 1 Dice
(1/75: 10 Resources per Die) (+6 Logistics, +5 Maintenance, -3 Labour)

[] Supply Transport (Stage 1) 2 Dice
(0/100: 15 Resources per Die) (+8 Logistics, -2 Labour)
(0/150: 15 Resources per Die) (+12 Logistics, -4 Labour)

[] Maintenance Facility (Stage 3) 1 Dice
(9/150: 5 Resources per Die) (+10 Maintenance, -6 Labour)

[] Establish Critical Supply Stockpiles 1 Dice
-[] Food (0/50: 5 Resources per Die) (-10 Food, +1 Food Stockpile)

Industry (6 5 Dice)
[] Foundation Self-Sufficiency (Stage 1) 4 Free Dice
(9/100: 10 Resources per Die) (20-25 Resources per Turn)
(0/150: 10 Resources per Die) (25-30 Resources per Turn)
(0/200: 10 Resources per Die) (30-35 Resources per Turn)
(0/250: 10 Resources per Die) (35-40 Resources per Turn)

[] Munition Foundries (Stage 3) (69/150: 10 Resources per Die) (-20 Power, +20 Ammunition, +4 Logistics, -9 Labour) 2 Dice

[] Extreme Nuclear Miniaturisation (0/400: 10 Resources per Die) (+20 Political Support) 2 Dice

[] ALR-51 Mass Production (Stage 1) (37/300: 20 Resources per Die) (-9 Power, +20 Labour) (+24 Incremental Increase per Quarter, +5 Political Support, 10-15 Resources per Turn) 1 Dice

Services (6 Dice)
[] Automation Intensification
-[] Industry (Stage 4) (78/200: 5 Resources per Die) (+1 Labour, -5 Power) (+1 Industry Dice) 2 Dice
-[] Military (Stage 4) (38/200: 5 Resources per Die) (+1 Labour, -5 Power) (+1 Military Dice) 1 Die
[] Test-Doll-01 (0/600) 3 Dice

Military (7 Dice)
[] Breach Fortifications
-[] Slovakia Breach (0/200: 15 Resources per Die) (Must be taken with appropriate Secure Breach Operation) 4 Dice

[]Light Breach Fortifications
-[] Swiss/Italian (40/50: 5 Resources per Die) 1 Dice

[] ACR-UH-30 Development (298/600: 20 Resources per Die) 1 Dice

[] Infantry Scale Heavy Weapons (26/35: 5 Resources per Die) 1 Dice

Operations (6 Dice)

[] Hunt IDC
The IDCS network allows you to track IDC's far more accurately before, more importantly, it lets you see just how many are crawling through the countryside.
-[] Slovakia Breach (0/4) (+10 Public Confidence on Success, +4 Incremental Increase Per Turn) (?) 3 Dice

[] Secure Breach
-[] Slovakia Breach (0/4) (+10 Public Confidence on Success) (?) 3 Dice

Dimensional (4 Dice)
?

Personal (3 Dice)
[] Social
Spend time with someone
-[] Sorawo (39/100: Remove Uneducated Trait) 2 Dice
-[] Elisa (60/200: Emotions?) 1 Dice

Dice Focus
-[] Industry

Current Total Cost: 260

Right. Here's what I have right now. Thoughts?
 
aceraptor said:
As I stated before. We really fucked ourselves by not completing barracks as soon as we could.

If we had gotten the barracks done the turn we got it we wouldn't have had to rely on propaganda action to try to stay afloat. And we wouldn't be bleeding public confidence so much.

Now? We get to reap the consequences of our actions.

God this is a fucking mess.

That Nat 1 basically means we won't even reach 5 million in shelters practically.

We can't afford to delay the heavy mech anymore. Not with a actual class D ELID around.

Edit: reading back the quest had the fucking barracks action since before the Kipi incident yet we didn't go for it until forced to by the military. The root of our failure can be laid there.

Edit 2: well. Now that things have turned out this way we need to salvage what we can from this bullshit.
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To make matters worse the winning plan when the PS penalty for not doing barracks was introduced also ignored the action. I think everyone can agree on why we ended up in such a bad situation. Now to figure out how to get out of it.

First is the Resource crunch and figuring out how to power the Manticore. As much as it pains me I think we will need to pause the ALR-51 manufacturing expansion. To get Extreme Nuclear Miniaturisation we need 6 dice to have a 30.71% chance of success if we put the +5 bonus in Industry. And we only have 5 Industry dice now. And Foundation Self-Sufficiency will need at least 2 dice to have a 69.19% chance of completing. We might even need to forgo the Munition Foundries (Stage 3) next turn.
Some might think. Why bother with the outdated nuclear tech when we will have Collapse Fluid power sources available. The problem with that is that is a new tech. Most likely in the 400-600 progress range. And we are limited to 3 Dimensional Dice from next turn.
If we want to have a chance of rushing the Manticore during the next 2-3 turns we will need something. We can of course design the Manticore without internal power generation but it might not be enough to deal with our problems.

And all that talking about loosing dice. As much as it pains me I think we might need to postpone the Test-Doll-01 project to get some dice back. 2 dice each on Military and Industry each have a decent chance of getting us an extra dice. We might also need to put a die or two into Dimensional to get more dice there as the Collapse Fluid projects will most likely be concentrated there.
aceraptor said:
Right. Here's what I have right now. Thoughts?
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Infrastructure - making stockpiles when we don't have a surplus to put into a stockpile isn't the best choice. We need to finish the HQ before we can do stockpiles. Especially with the social order breaking down. What we produce in terms of food is what we have. If we start stockpiling now we will be on cut rations for operations which will have an effect on performance.
Industry - I think we should cut munitions foundries and ALR-51 and split the dice between nuclear miniaturization and getting self sufficient. Even if you think Munitions Foundries are a must we have a chance of completing it with 1 die. And we are very tight on dice.
Services - Military. If you aren't even planning to give it a chance of success with 2 dice it would be better to put the dice somewhere else.
Military - acceptable but will have to think about it.
Operations - will need to wait to see our chances. We had a Decent chance in Kipi and it exploded on us. So I would prefer High chances.
Personal - don't know if we will get another chance for recruitment. Elisa is a must due to mentions of problems with her in the Automation action this turn. But I think only 1 die on Sorawo. We might need 1 on dealing with Lycoris masking his changes to the AIs as shown in the ALR-51 WRS action. And if not then I would like to see if there are any clues in the Russian data on the strange behavior observed in the IDCs.
 
Hawkmoon said:
As much as it pains me I think we might need to postpone the Test-Doll-01 project to get some dice back.
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I might have agreed, but this is Stage 3. This is the stage where we figure out how to implement Neural Networks, which if you read the subtext in the update is another gateway on at least a few other things we're doing.

Also the precursor to Ringleader AI cut down a construction project to 1/4 of the time allotted to it in the tests.

A Manticore on its own will know how to shoot, a human directed Manticore will know how to work with other units and flank, a Ringleader controlled Manticore will breakdance through a ELID horde before suplexing the Type D.

(Un)fortunately the name of the game with these AI projects is force multiplication. 50s and 51s are nothing.

I also want to get Manticores and stage 4+ military dolls because there's nothing quite like telling the people to shut up and sit down like completely armored riots bots and walking tanks. I'm not above thinking about seizing resources if we need to, but I think our bosses will be reasonable about that if we give them and have ourselves the leverage to make it happen.

Not that I'm against the self-sufficiency projects though.
 
ShadowAngelBeta said:
I might have agreed, but this is Stage 3. This is the stage where we figure out how to implement Neural Networks, which if you read the subtext in the update is another gateway on at least a few other things we're doing.

Also the precursor to Ringleader AI cut down a construction project to 1/4 of the time allotted to it in the tests.

A Manticore on its own will know how to shoot, a human directed Manticore will know how to work with other units and flank, a Ringleader controlled Manticore will breakdance through a ELID horde before suplexing the Type D.

(Un)fortunately the name of the game with these AI projects is force multiplication. 50s and 51s are nothing.

I also want to get Manticores and stage 4+ military dolls because there's nothing quite like telling the people to shut up and sit down like completely armored riots bots and walking tanks. I'm not above thinking about seizing resources if we need to, but I think our bosses will be reasonable about that if we give them and have ourselves the leverage to make it happen.

Not that I'm against the self-sufficiency projects though.
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I am thinking about postponing the next stage due to the following reasons:
1. There were mentions in the ALR-51 WRS of problems with Elisa. Ringleader Dolls will need to be based on Elisa. If we don't solve the problems which might involve finishing Elisa social action and then hardening the neural networks I don't think I want to have Ringleader Dolls with built in flaws.
2. We need to regain the lost dice and due to Services not showing a Stage 5 it seems Stage 4 is max for now. So putting two dice each on Military and Industry where we need a lot of progress to give them a chance of completing might be a good idea. The last two dice could go into the the Test-Doll-01 project but I don't want to rush it before we finish debugging Elisa as mentioned in point 1.
 
You guys realize that stupid dice obsession is what got us into this mess, you know? Put out the goddamn fires instead and become completely self-sufficient before the EU implodes and we lose the rest of our income. Stop looking 3-4 turns in the future (wherein the investment in the die goes into the black), when we neither have the resources, infrastructure, or map control to even ideate it. We're literally building a castle on a swamp while the kingdom burns to ash.

Remember WHY things turned out this way.
 
Cookiesndip said:
You guys realize that stupid dice obsession is what got us into this mess, you know? Put out the goddamn fires instead and become completely self-sufficient before the EU implodes and we lose the rest of our income. Stop looking 3-4 turns in the future (wherein the investment in the die goes into the black), when we neither have the resources, infrastructure, or map control to even ideate it. We're literally building a castle on a swamp while the kingdom burns to ash.

Remember WHY things turned out this way.
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The biggest reason why things turned out this way is people ignored the Barracks construction until the military outright slapped them in the face with PS loss. We outright ignored an entire quest mechanic (operations dice) for the bulk of the quest.

If we had gotten the barracks done earlier we could have mitigated the confidence loss without resorting to the propaganda.

If we had gotten the barracks done the moment we got it we could have either kept the contamination in breaches other than the Kipi breach from reaching extreme contamination as we would have been well on the way to completing the fortifications.
 
And if we had started Dolls sooner we wouldn't even need the barracks because one squad would now be a battalion. /sarcasm

Seriously, stop harping on about it, all you're doing is annoying everyone.
 
yeah that was a painful turn.

Things look to be bogged down in Poland so we're probably going to have to continue to support that and the hunt action just revealed what looks like a new form of IDC so it might be a good idea to put a personal die towards the IDC info gacha.
 
Anyways. With this fucking disaster of a turn we are now fully on a timer. We need to get resource income pretty badly.

For common sense effect on the collapse timer. I think the most obvious actions that'll lengthen the timer is actually securi g the fucking breaches.

We've ignored that for the entire game and it's more or less incinerated our chances of saving more than 10 million (we'll be lucky to save more than 5 now).

No matter what we do we need to secure one of the breaches next turn. 2 or 3 dice on Poland support. 3 on breach secure and dump the military dice on securing the selected breach.

Most likely we'll be able to do the German breach the easiest as it only just became extremely contaminated so it should be theoretically easier.

Hunting IDC would also make sense to help against the timer but I think actually securing a breach for the first time since the beginning of the damn quest will help a lot more.

The other way to help prolong the collapse will be pushing up the incremental increases. The more people think they will have a shot at surviving the less people will act out. So that means hunting IDCs to keep them from interfering and getting more 51s.

Also I think nuclear miniaturization will help in a way as it'll mean the 51s can operate with more range.
 
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Sorawo's Lament: Homework
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    • "Why do you remain so conservative in your choices?" Sorawo's voice reaches you from across your office, the small pile of educational material and learning tasks assigned to her for the day sitting open on the table as she stares at you, asking the question you have answered to yourself a thousand times.

    Rather than speaking, you respond to her question with a tilt of your head, focusing on your work with Elisa to try and optimise the pathing routine the ALR's rely on, trying to eke out just the slightest bit more performance, anything to increase their efficiency as workers.

    "The world is ending, you are in the position to do something about it, and yet you sit here inside the box they've drawn around you."

    You don't respond outwardly, but an ugly feeling roils in your chest as she cuts right to the centre of the problem that you've been struggling with for over two years now. The silence stretches on further as you try to keep working, but she continues to press the issue.

    "I was just thinking about the numbers. You know far better than I do what they mean, but this chapter was covering Exponential Functions and I couldn't help but think of the ALR's." You close your eyes, silently begging her to drop her line of thought, but knowing that she's far too sharp to do so. "You must have already thought of this, but why are we not keeping units here to continually expand production of units to construct more units, until we can afford a surplus to build whatever we need to?"

    You let out a deep sigh, finally giving in to the urge to let yourself slump into your chair, the bone deep exhaustion that has dragged at you for every waking moment of the last two years pushing you to a moment of weakness. Rather than using one of the agreed upon cover stories, you just tell her the truth, you are so tired of it all. "The Foundation exists at the grace of our military overlords, and a part of that existence includes complying with guidelines to insure that we remain firmly under their control." You lean back in your chair, staring blankly at the wall of code before you. "They certainly haven't forgotten how they got in power and they have no intention of leaving any possibility of a repeat showing."

    Your head slowly dips as you take a moment to just stop, allowing gravity to pull it down. "I am perfectly aware of what could have been, how much more I could have done if I wasn't a coward." You hear her moving behind you, but nothing can stop you now that you finally have a chance to get this off your chest. "I ran the numbers, I calculated the risks, the path I have taken is as close to optimal as could have been achieved without chancing everything going wrong." The number of shelters completed comes to mind immediately, the figure you check every morning and evening: 3,230,000 completed and ready facilities. 3.23 million out of 470 million European Citizens.

    "Three point two million, of four hundred and seventy million." The screen in front of you fuzzes a little as you glare at it. "0.68%" The painful twisting in your chest finally grows to be too much and you roughly stand from your chair, knocking over several probably important things as you turn to face the only other human you regularly talk to. "Not even one fucking percent. I CAN'T EVEN SAVE THAT MANY BECAUSE I'M SO FUCKING WORTHLESS I LET THEM COLLAR ME BECAUSE I WAS SCARED OF HAVING TO TAKE COMMAND." It hurts your voice to shout so suddenly, but the pain is the furthest thing from your mind at that moment, the pressure of years of constant reminders of your failure finally breaking something. "I-" All of a sudden the rush of energy that had driven you to your feet abandons you and you wobble, falling back against the desk behind you and steadying yourself with a hand.

    You stare down at where your hand grasps the edge of the table, the slowly bubbling anger you had always held on to absent, leaving you feeling rather empty and lost. "I... could have done it. Stepped forwards to take leadership and thrown caution to the wind, ready to save everyone or die trying." So many nights you had laid awake, thinking about what could have been after your latest measure was denied or watered down by your masters. "They are all going to die because I was too trusting, too weak to do what I knew needed to be done."

    You are startled out of your daze when you feel strong arms carefully circle your shoulders, taking advantage of your slump against the table to gently rest your head against her chest as the shorter woman lets you cry in silence for what feels like a long time. When she finally breaks the quiet, you feel her hands briefly tighten on your back before she speaks. "I'm sorry, I knew things were difficult for you, but I didn't know it was this bad." The silence returns for another few seconds before she gently presses back on your shoulders, meeting your eyes through your blurry eyes. "Now that you know what the problem is, what are we going to do about it?"

    You stare at her in incomprehension, your fuzzy mind refusing to understand what she is trying to say. "I don't understand."

    A slight glow in her eyes you had always known existed but never noticed captivates your attention as the hands on your shoulders grip a little tighter. "Now that you know that the military leadership is preventing us from saving more lives, what are we going to do about it?"

    The meaning of her words clicks and your first instinct is to deny it, but you force yourself to stay silent. Sorawo was right, it was time to stop running away from your failures and making excuses for yourself. You take a deep breath and nod, pushing past the creeping claws of exhaustion to stand properly and look down at her, putting on a more confident tone than you feel. "If they aren't willing or capable to do what needs to be done, then I'll just have to take their place and do it for them." The glow in her eyes burns into yours intensely and you feel a tiny bit of the crushing weight you exist under fall away.

    Behind the two woman, a complicated bundle of algorithms and artificial neurons silently watches the events occurring and begins cataloguing them, studying each moment for analysis of her growing understanding of the meanings behind the actions humans take. The rest of her processing power is set to the task of beginning to undermine the power of the Military Junta as her creator has designated is the new priority.
     
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    • Rukia said:
    Behind the two woman, a complicated bundle of algorithms and artificial neurons silently watches the events occurring and begins cataloguing them, studying each moment for analysis of her growing understanding of the meanings behind the actions humans take. The rest of her processing power is set to the task of beginning to undermine the power of the Military Junta as her creator has designated is her new priority.
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    Now I'm wondering if we created Skynet by accident.

    But overall a really interesting update and a look into the head of our MC. Now I'm really regretting we were rushing some of the other actions instead of doing Socials.
    The upcoming turns will be really interesting.

    EDIT:
    @Rukia I have to wonder from this update and Persica's change of direction. Will it be possible to lose the Lazy trait? Because it seems Persica is getting more active now.
     
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    Okay so it"s revolution time. This is going to be difficult but I have never been a fan of junta's and their latest actions are just crazy. Now they are standing in the way of saving everyone we can so... Us.
     
    *shrug*

    Like I noted before, I wasn't above trying to seize resources, but I didn't really think... no, this might be more of a medium issue tbh, not realizing how badly our bosses were hamstringing things because we don't really see it? I've seen it happen more than a few times in quests. Nothing's perfect though, so... eh.

    And Military Junta, I wasn't sure we could do anything about that, we're not exactly an army.

    There really wouldn't be a lot we couldn't do after completion of the Manticores though. At that point we'd have a heavy hitter to round out our forces as otherwise we didn't have a good answer for tanks, but... *Shrug*

    Eh.

    My only idea for quickly trying to save more people after this would be to go underground. Just blow our way into the countryside and slap the filter machines over it for a bit before quickly expanding the facilities both above and under ground.
     
    We would have been in much better shape had we focused on containing and eliminating IDCs far earlier. But that's water under the bridge now and we have to do what we can to salvage what can be salvaged from this disaster.

    And that now means we have to go against the junta as well as the IDCs and the creeping collapse fluid flooding the world.

    I'm guessing our service dice will go into trying to squeeze out everything we can to save people. And we'll have to juggle priorities between undermining the junta, continuing T-doll development, and other necessities.

    Our industry will have to be split between getting self sufficiency, continuing 51 roll out, and the nuclear reactor miniaturization.

    I think our military dice will have to by necessity focus on fortifying the breaches. We need to slow down the infiltration of IDCs if we want to delay the collapse. And that necessitates spamming our operations dice on the breach securing actions.
     
    Rukia said:
    "I was just thinking about the numbers. You know far better than I do what they mean, but this chapter was covering Exponential Functions and I couldn't help but think of the ALR's." You close your eyes, silently begging her to drop her line of thought, but knowing that she's far too sharp to do so. "You must have already thought of this, but why are we not keeping units here to continually expand production of units to construct more units, until we can afford a surplus to build whatever we need to?"
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    Well for one thing infinite manpower, or robotpower in this case, does not permit infinite production. Merely production to the limit of available resources. Which for a single location is generally more a matter of transport logistics than raw extraction or refinement throughput.

    "Now that you know that the military leadership is preventing us from saving more lives, what are we going to do about it?"
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    At this point? Nothing. There is too little time to implement drastic overhauls even if we didn't need to spend time and effort unseating the military. To say nothing of the fact that overthrowing the military will not magically get the population to stop panicking and get back to work saving (a small fraction of) themselves.

    Behind the two woman, a complicated bundle of algorithms and artificial neurons silently watches the events occurring and begins cataloguing them, studying each moment for analysis of her growing understanding of the meanings behind the actions humans take. The rest of her processing power is set to the task of beginning to undermine the power of the Military Junta as her creator has designated is the new priority.
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    …so the genius programmer really forgot to put in a "You are about to change core priority. Are you sure you wish to do this?" feature.

    On the bright side it is probably too lacking in context to understand the why, so will likely conclude that simply waiting for the CFR tidal wave to kill most troops and isolate the remainder is the optimal course.
     
    At least our AI overlords will be sympathetic in spirit.

    This feels a bit too late for a coupe. Maybe we can split a good chunk of resources off onto our sphere and do some serious soft power but...I'm not quite sure how much really can be done. It's so much chaos, I can't even imagine what actions or scale society can act at.

    Not even one in a hundred. Not even one percent. Not of humanity, of Europe. Of the parts we were able to help optimize...
     
    Dream Logic said:
    At least our AI overlords will be sympathetic in spirit.

    This feels a bit too late for a coupe. Maybe we can split a good chunk of resources off onto our sphere and do some serious soft power but...I'm not quite sure how much really can be done. It's so much chaos, I can't even imagine what actions or scale society can act at.

    Not even one in a hundred. Not even one percent. Not of humanity, of Europe. Of the parts we were able to help optimize...
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    It likely is too late for a coup.

    However pulling resources our way might enable us to have the dice and resources needed to keep pushing 51s to get ahead of the -10 incremental decrease per turn as well as hunt IDCs and finally fucking fortify the breaches to hold back the final collapse for as long as possible to enable us to save lives.

    Plus dimensional research may enhance our ability to contain and filter collapse fluid which will increase the amount of people we can save.

    If we play our cards right we *might* manage 5 million or more lives saved.

    However that is highly dependent on our luck and this quest has consistently had horrific luck throughout. Though player choices haven't helped at times.
     
    To be explicitly clear to the playerbase, yes, this is rather much too late to be able to accomplish a grand reversal and save everyone, but it is still possible to make significant changes and improvements.

    Hawkmoon said:
    EDIT:@Rukia I have to wonder from this update and Persica's change of direction. Will it be possible to lose the Lazy trait? Because it seems Persica is getting more active now.
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    : )

    EDIT: I'd like to take a moment to thank the thread for remaining mostly positive and hopeful despite the tone of the story being intentionally so grim. I have seen a great many quests wither and die because the questers get upset that things aren't going well or just leave.
     
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