I want to get Iron Nerve socials and pains seals. The way get it is buy securing his powerbase through a combination of money, 7th path trade, a way to launder seals into money without being tracked, research notes, possibly a summoner, and, a dragon sword.
Clarification - is this what you want ultimately, or is this what you want out of the first visit?
If the former, what do you want out of the first visit?
If the latter, how do you plan on achieving that?
I am not worried of being out maneuvered because our offer will be completely genuine. If we are not getting the high EV items we will just not make a deal. And if we are worried about him trying to socially maneuver us we will have Hanna available to tilt the flow of negotiations into our favor.
Our apology to the Obayun was entirely genuine. We lost the social combat and we could have taken consequences etc.
I don't agree that we're going to be able to bring Hana to the negotiating table, especially not in the context of social combat with the head of the Kurosawa. It will be very easy for him to say 'Hana, this is between us' and very difficult for her to refuse a direct order like that.
Actors that we engage with can be assumed, IMO, to try to use the advantages they have to get the better of us. When they have higher social skills than us (most ninja we try to trade with, probably every Kurosawa chuunin, almost certainly Hanzo) I expect them to a) recognize this b) remove things we could use to mitigate our disadvantage and c) force a contested roll which we then lose.
Do you agree that's a likely outcome? If not, why not? If so, what's your contingency? I don't think that simple precommitment ('we will not make bad deals') is going to be enough to protect us from the vast spectrum of possible bad outcomes.
Yes this is international politics and we are going to be helping Mist. However a majority of Mist is already under foreign influence since Ami is a Leaf nin. I think we can easily sell this to Asuma as giving him a second lever to use to keep Mist from deciding to back stab us. I personally disagree with your assessment of Hazou's political abilities. Another thing to remember is that any knowledge we get about our bloodline is a long term powerup to Leaf through our descendants. If Asuma isn't on board the plan doesn't work but I don't see any reasons he would inherently be against it
I disagree that we can trivially take this to the Hokage, but I think that it
would be smart to sit down and have a conversation with Leaf's leading expert on Mist - that is, Ami - and talk to her about this sort of thing. One, it ensures we don't step on any of her Mist plans (which are now, by extension, Leaf/Asuma's plans) and for another, if she thinks that we have something, she'll probably help us optimize, offer us resources, and generally be supportive. That might not be costless, but there isn't a downside to letting her know what we're doing (we'd have to anyway because we can't run our own op in Mist when there's a possibility of running into a Leaf op) and just floating the idea probably costs way less than asking for her help. At the very least, we can get a price for that help out of her and pay for her initial impressions with...whatever dessert she likes, and a miniature replica of Hokage Mountain with her face and Kei's face on it.
(That might be treason but I'm sure we can think of a fun gift she can then tease us endlessly about.)
I think that a smart thing to do here would be to first go to Ami and propose our plan. You're right that she has a lot of control over Mist. I expect Asuma uses it (or tries). She's more inclined to
