If the other party resorts to tactics like this as a first action, their demands in negotiations are likely to be unreasonable.
On the contrary, it speaks to what they feel is necessary to be in a position to make any demands at all.
If it is the, highly unlikely, case that they just want healing, then that's a reasonable desire even if it doesn't warrant kidnapping our people. If they do demand unreasonable things, then the benefit to having negotiated is that we know who attacked us and won't go harring off to strike at the wrong people.
Just as a note, I quite doubt that 'healing' will be what they demand. I suspect that that is their ultimate
goal, but that the demand will be the means by which they can accomplish it (ie: cubes, or the territory to gain cubes from), in a rather brute-force approach. Figuring out the actual goal they want to accomplish would be part of making the negotiations solvable.
This is a standard pattern I see in all aspects of customer/tech support (ie: where people demand something be done): they don't actually understand the root problem they're trying to solve, or decide they've already figured out how to solve it, and just want the means to accomplish that. For my part on the programming side, I have to break what they say down into tiny pieces to figure out what they're
really asking for, in order to build an actual solution that isn't just a band-aid patch.
Since our primary suspect is Naru, we should ask Ayako about her and the other 3 greens. One of them might have been the clairvoyant sniper or the teleporter.
I think this might be a bit of an OOC action. A lot of the reason we suspect them is due to omake knowledge, and is not something Kyouko would be aware of. Kyouko can be suspicious, and maybe ask leading questions, but direct questions like that seem out of place.
Unless I'm mistaken, they have always been the first to initiate hostilities.
Depends on how you define 'hostilities'. There are definitely different tiers, and Kaori's initial kidnapping was about as low as you can get on that scale, while the response escalated well above that. They (assuming this is Naru) have escalated sufficiently beyond that scale that it's not possible for the Serene to counter-escalate to the same degree and retain any degree of safety.
Basically, "If you want to play the game that way, we can play it too." The demands in the Kaori incident were actually quite reasonable (explicitly noted as such in the update); the Serenes were just in a position where we flat out couldn't afford it. If you go back and look at it, they were essentially asking for 1 cube to make up the deficit of what they couldn't afford (4 girls in a 3-territory), plus one cube for the hostage that they intended to keep to ensure we kept paying. Given that the second cube was one that we had to pay anyway (ie: Kaori's normal upkeep), it was literally a demand for 1 cube per month to keep a girl from dying. And we came down on them like a ton of bricks, and kicked them out of their territory and home.
So the idea that they might hold a rather lasting grudge, and that any action they take is going to have a significant number of safeguards, is something that should take no effort at all to see.
As for the idea of starting a fight to capture their seeds or whatever? The instant we show that we literally cannot be trusted to negotiate in good faith, I'm betting those soul gems get crushed. There's just no point in even trying to work with someone like that. (and by 'someone' I mean 'us')
If this is Naru, and
if they have been in contact with Ayako and Mariko, they will have been told that Ayako and Mariko, at least, believe the hype — that the Serene are the 'good guys'. If Ayako is acting as a double agent, and Mariko's capture was accepted as part of the deal, they're putting their lives on the line in their faith that Mami will pull through and prove them right. If she goes murderhobo....
