My point is that if Amu is going to be "promising vastly more then she ever had to, because she sucks at social in the end" then her promises shouldn't have value, because the value to Amu is negative. Keeping your promises is for people who don't have that issue.
Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]
- Thread starter Baughn
- Start date
- Crossover
- Location
- Laniakea
My friend, "in-character" went out the window the moment Midori Hinamori started haranguing her daughter for the truth like a helicopter parent.
It's quite ironic, really - during the exact same episode of the series where Saeki helped the Guardians find Ikuto, right before they drove to her TV station, Amu had a phone call with her mother angsting over telling her the truth about what they were about to do (i.e. find Ikuto and potentially fight him). At that time, Nikaidou was driving them around and encouraged Amu to call her parents, because it was getting late and knew they would get worried.
In the end, Amu chickened out of telling them anything and deflected using the excuse that it was "Guardian business" and that Nikaidou was chaperoning them. Midori recognized Amu was hiding thing, but acknowledged that it must be important to her and didn't press Amu or demand she not go (much less send someone else), but only said to Amu that she could tell her the whole story later.
In-character, Midori should have accepted Amu's explanation of having made a promise and not pushed like she's constipated. That vote in 2.1 should've gone through without any dice rolls, if everyone was "in-character". Midori wouldn't even be a problem. Not if things were "normal".
But that didn't happen. That Bane has ratcheted up Midori's fear and concern. She's no longer "in-character".
In-character Amu, I think, would probably do what @Quickshot0 wants to do and go full-rebel against her mother, refuse to say a word and storm out of the house, leaving her mother aghast and dismayed.
But if we did that, this out-of-character Bane-fuelled Midori is going to be a futher problem down the line, because she's going to have a freak-out at Ami and Tsumugu over Amu's behavior. And even if Amu can continue to shrug her parents off with social combat or something every time they try and corner her, at some point Ami is going to get involved in the whole dispute too.
If Ami runs off with Amu, her parents are probably going to lose it and send JPs after us.
If Ami takes her parents' side - Amu sure won't be able to bulldoze her way through her so easily, unlike Midori and Tsumugu.
Is calling Saeki the first thing Amu would think of canonically? I doubt it. Amu doesn't hold her in much regard or know her especially well, she'd sooner call Nikaidou than Saeki. But canonically, Midori wouldn't be cornering her daughter like this either.
New game? New moves.
[X] Plan Keep the Secret
[X] The most important part of the truth: they don't trust anyone but you and each other. And they're not that sure about you.
-[X] The danger is that they especially don't trust people like JPs, and the entire country knows you've been talking to JPs. They don't know for sure that you didn't tell JPs anything about them.
[X] The most important part of the truth: they don't trust anyone but you and each other. And they're not that sure about you.
-[X] The danger is that they especially don't trust people like JPs, and the entire country knows you've been talking to JPs. They don't know for sure that you didn't tell JPs anything about them.
People's actions are shaped by their knowledge and experiences. Midori's recent experiences include having Amu get hospitalized for a week and a half, fighting on the front lines against a giant demon attack where (assuming that news headline got the count right) 11 kids died.
What's in character for her with this experience is different from what would have been in character for her without it. She's not being a helicopter parent. She's demonstrating concern for her precious daughter, who she has good reason to suspect might be heading off to die.
- Location
- Laniakea
Not an issue, in this case.
For it to be detected by someone requires it to be targeted at them:
The only target for Saeki's reading is Midori Hinamori. Forget the Scavengers, we're not even directly targeting their house.
Obviously, Midori knows she's the target and won't defend against it. Not that she could, even if she wanted to.
She only knows about the danger, because Amu (and I guess Miki) failed the roll on 2.1 to explain that they made a promise not to tell, which would have hidden the danger (like she was able to hide the fact she would be fighting Ikuto canonically). I mean hell, the vote for that even made sure to specify that there would be no demons involved.
Canonically, Midori would have accepted it at that and not pushed and never heard anything about any risk of getting shot.
EDIT: In fact, let me point out the exact moment that failed roll kicked in during 2.2 -
I have severe doubts that an in-character Midori would ever have told her daughter to her face that she wasn't being reassuring, even if she suspected Amu was concealing things from her.
If we go by the TV series, she would've told Amu to come back and tell her the whole story later.
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Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
This is rather inaccurate.
The "In-character" basis is a Midori who hasn't, in the last seven days, learned her daughter has magic powers, fought demons that killed multiple schoolmates of hers, and ended up covered head to toe in blood and seemed not to care about it.
She also learned that Amu can mind read / control her.
Midori is entirely in character, the events in the show just didn't give her enough information to realise that ego death was on the cards if Easter won. She's gotten enough context from her school having multiple deaths, fighting for their lives, and Amu being in something close to a coma.
This is just inaccurate.
If she's scrying 'the meeting at the Scavengers house' or 'the house Midori is going to' then it will, by necessity of needing to check what the Scavengers actions are, scry the Scavengers.
You can't use precog to predict the Scavengers without 'targeting' them.
If it doesn't target them, then it's not useful for predicating their actions.
The only way it isn't going to ping them is if they aren't there, and have zero chance of being there in the time frame being scried for.
- Location
- Laniakea
She's scrying neither of those things.
Read my vote again - she's scrying "whether Midori would be safe if she were to come along with Amu to the house they plan on visiting".
In addition to explicitly not telling her about the Scavengers, the reading request contains absolutely no mention of the Scavengers - because it's not necessarily the Scavengers that Midori might be at risk from. It could be Manticore, or demons, or traps left behind.
I actually didn't even assume that Midori would make it all the way to the house - the wording for the reading was meant to account for the possibility that armed men were watching the perimeter and might ambush them before Amu even got within Mental Range of the place.
Whatever the reason behind her personality shift compared to the manga/anime, it really doesn't change the point I'm making - different Midori, different ways to handle her.
She's no longer acting in-character as per the source material. Can't expect in-character Amu responses to work.
Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
That does not matter. I did read your vote.
It is precog modelling "Midori if she goes to the house". It has to ping the Scavengers to see if the Scavengers are a threat to Midori.
We know that Saeki uses psionics to precog, because the same ability lets her see Guardian Charas.
We know that Guardian Chara's pull their knowledge and skills from the Collective Unconscious.
Therefore, Saeki's precog works off the Collective Unconscious.
If Saeki has no knowledge of the Scavengers or where Midori is going, then the only source of information for her precog is the CU, and the Scavengers are the only real source of information about "Will we do anything to harm Midori?". (Assuming she doesn't have Mental Range 5 or such, which would also still have to ping them, just directly instead of via the CU.)
Therefore, her precog has to ping them, because it doesn't pull information out of the void, it's using the CU to 1: Get info. 2: Use that info to model based off it.
There is no way to precog the Scavengers house and if they are a threat without precog-ing them.
Clever wording will not get around this restriction, Saeki is not accessing the Loom to get information, she is tapping the sum of humanity.
And that means humanity (the Scavengers) get to roll to see if they feel that tap, and defend against it.
That's not being out of character, that's growing with changes.
It's not 'in-character' for Amu to be do a lot of the things she's done in the quest so far by that definition, because she's changed compared to the manga/anime.
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- Location
- Laniakea
Fairly sure it doesn't work that way.
Although only the QM could definitively say whether or not precog will always "ping people" while trying, what he said about detection makes it extremely unlikely.
There would be no "if" to debate about, if it always requires "pinging people".
The fact it's an "if", rather than a guaranteed, means that it IS possible to target something that is not people. Which in turn means shouldn't always "ping" people whenever it is used - or at least, even if it somehow does, it wouldn't ever affect them to a great enough extent that it would be "noticeable" to someone, when the attempt is not directed at that specific person.
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Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
How do you think it will be able to predict the Scavengers, if it doesn't interact with them?
- Location
- Laniakea
We don't actually know how precog works in this quest or how many types there are - but in Devil Survivor 2, the type used by Nicaea worked off the Akashic Records.
For all we know, even psychic precog might pull from there too.
Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
The Akashic Records, as shown by Nicaea's very first prediction, can predict demons / the summoning thereof.
The Chairman/Tsukasa can apparently not, going by the dead kids.
Saeki is, from what we can tell, using the same system as Tsukasa, as both are linked to the Guardian system / psionics.
My conclusion from that is that Psionic / Shugo Chara side precog is not using the Akashic Records.
So the information has to come from the Collective Unconscious / Sea of Souls, and therefore needs to access the people involve to predict them.
Or access other peoples information about a person, but the Scavengers don't really seem to have any non-psionic people who know them in deep detail to access instead.
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- Location
- Laniakea
The Akashic Records aren't exactly perfect either, the death clips don't come true if an outsider intervenes.
There's also the theory the world that Amu is currently living in is largely cognitive.
By that theory, everybody would be "pinging" off everybody else, all the time - the joint consensus on reality would be what forms the reality everyone sees. This would explain why Illusions can be made real with 2 dots. If people can be convinced "hard enough" that something is real, it becomes real. And every use of Illusion is forcibly convincing the collective unconscious that a thing made using it is real, with 2 dots being the threshold for that.
Under this theory, yeah, it may well be possible that Precognition "pings" off everyone, but in that context also wouldn't be any more invasive than Illusion would be, except unless directed at a specific person.
Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
It could be wrong, but that just means free will nominally exists. Until the prediction was made, as far as we know, that was the future.
The predication is what derails things by giving people extra information.
Psionic precog just misses stuff from what we can tell, it just flat out did not know that demons appearing was an option.
Unless Tsukasa somehow reacted to a reading that didn't include demons in a way that somehow caused demons.
Which is possible, I guess, but seems unlikely.
(What is also possible, is that he couldn't predict it, because Saaya was the spark point of that reality breach, and she was shielding from psionic connections by burning her own mind away. Blocking his precog that works on CU modeling.)
-
And under that theory, this would be a ping/effect, effecting their home, without warning or a visible caster.
If they detect it (And they have Aoi, a notably competent clairvoyant) they will likely assuming it's a hostile attack / scry, and go to ground.
For the gain of... nothing other than not telling Midori in advance, since Amu will most likely be able to detect an ambush with scan.
And even if it succeeds, we've risked a random non-family stranger getting info on them.
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- Location
- Laniakea
Under that theory, they would be pinged all the time. And I mean ALL the time.
Every time they turn on a TV to a show, whatever they would be seeing is somebody else's cognitive perception of a event pinging off them, telling them to see X on their TV screen. The existence of the damned TV itself would be a whole bunch of people's thoughts that there was a TV that existed in a shop that they bought (or stole), which is now at their house, pinging off them. The existence of their house would be other people's collective thoughts of there being a house, pinging off them.
Any precognitives pinging off them would be a few extra drops in an ocean.
Of course, that's all still just a theory. We don't actually know how psychic precog works.
What we DO know is that it doesn't have to be targeted at people. And that it doesn't get noticed if it's not targeted at someone.
Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
If it's predicting someone, I don't agree that being clever with the wording will let you skip around 'technically not targeting them'.
Otherwise you would just always scry on someone's shoes and then pan the camera, and having mechanics for noticing scry would be pointless.
By the same basis, if it's possible to detect, then its clearly 'louder' or some other distinction that makes it stand out from basic reality operation, because it's something that can be detected. Otherwise we would not have mechanics for the chance to be noticed.
EDIT:
My assumption for 'not targeted at people' is that it's pulling from collective memory of a place to piece together what happened there, using before/after states and what data it can get from the people involved, snips of subconsciously heard sound from nearby, etc, to reconstruct the events.
I would imagine that it's impossible to retrocog the events inside a sealed and chemically cleaned vault, because sufficient data wouldn't exist without tapping the people involved. (assuming the people have mental defences).
By the same token, I imagine that a truly skilled and aware psionic retrocog / precog could chose to exclude 'sources' when running their predictions to avoid pinging/alerting people they don't want to, at the cost of degrading the quality of the vision.
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- Location
- Laniakea
In this particular case, it's a moot point anyway - there IS a person being deliberately targeted. It's Midori Hinamori.
If your argument is that "you can't target one person without targeting everybody they could potentially interact with in the vision even if you don't know who they may interact with"...... that just makes no sense, or at least is hugely stretching the notion of what it means to "target" to the point of being ridiculous.
If your argument is that "you can't target one person without targeting everybody they could potentially interact with in the vision even if you don't know who they may interact with"...... that just makes no sense, or at least is hugely stretching the notion of what it means to "target" to the point of being ridiculous.
I think you're reading way too much into the use of the specific word "target".
Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
That is my argument, yes, because otherwise it makes no sense as to how the precog can, well, precog
They can't be pulling information from the void, because Baughn has pointed out that retro/pre-cog powers have a risk of alerting those effected.
So the powers clearly interact on some level with those effected.
If it is an accurate predication of how Midori Hinamori's day is going to go, it has to predict what everyone interacting with her will do.
Otherwise it would not be able to tell what Midori Hinamori is going to do, because she would be noclipping through people on the street.
It either, 1: Has some ability to create pin point accurate models of those people from nothing, 2: Pings off those people's subconscious for modelling support, or 3: Uses the knowledge other, unprotected minds, have of those people to model them.
There's no such thing as a free lunch, the data has to come from somewhere, and we know that the clairvoyant powers can be detected.
So the only conclusion as to why they can be detected is that they are doing something there.
It might be an achronal scry sensor, it might be accessing the minds of those it's predicting.
Doesn't really matter, it's there, it's doing something, it can be detected. People who are paranoid and in hiding react badly to scrying.
- Location
- Laniakea
Well there is one person who knows the mechanics behind it for certain - we can just ask them directly:
@Baughn - Would an attempt to precog Midori Hinamori be detectable by anybody else she might interact with within that vision?
EDIT: I also feel like pointing out that, should we take this theory of yours to its logical conclusion:
Then that would mean precogs "ping" off absolutely everybody in existence in order to model the future world when making their prediction.
Since, in this example of walking down a crowded street, the movements of everybody there were affected by someone else's, like some bus driver a whole city away who may have gone slow and let somebody aboard who wouldn't otherwise have made it to the city street at that time, or airport staff in some foreign country who may or may not have held up people for a flight that may or may not have allowed them to be there on that street at that point in time.
Under this theory, every single prediction made by any and all precogs, ever, would be setting off alarm bells in everybody capable of detecting precognition being used all over the world, every time it happened. Does that seem likely to you? (And then, one more precog doing their thing wouldn't raise more alarms bells than the previous god-knows-how-many, anyway)
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Baughn
Healing-type writer
- Location
- Dublin
Sometimes, some of the time. Humans are goal-directed, so the actions of others can often be smoothed over; for instance, if she meets a woman she knows on the street then—if a potential precog predicted that Midori herself needed to be somewhere at a specific time—it might not need to take that woman's actions into account to guess that Midori will be at Place X at Time T, regardless of minor jostling in the crowd.
It also can't. As you point out, in the limit that requires pinging off literally the entire world. Which is intractable.
This is a large part of the reason for why precog is so unreliable, and why broad-strokes are easier than details. Tsukasa's tarot cards are (until recently) quite good at picking up problems, but wouldn't let him predict the third digit of the Google stock price in the morning.
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Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
For Laplace level precog, that is the definitional requirement, yes
For 'mostly accurate' precog, as Baughn's explanation shows, it will gloss over anything that doesn't have a high chance of effecting the end result.
I would imagine, however, that 'Will this person cause serious damage to the target or not' is something that needs to be checked to determine if they will be safe, when dealing with a group of people who have shown willingness to kill and paranoia in the past.
Since that's a very high impact aspect of the prediction.
Though, that does ask the question of, given the tiny amount of detail you want to give Saeki, would her prediction power even know that it needs to check for hidden military / Scavengers attacking, if she has no reason to believe that is a possible outcome.
Since her personal conscious expectations are likely not including the possibility of a Black Ops Manticore Retrieval team hiding in the bushes of the house, nor would she expect a teenager in there to have a Mind Crush ability she can use.
Which is probably a large part of why precog is unreliable, it has to have a cut off before 'scan the entire world and everyone within it' for power consumption reasons, and it most likely uses the casters expectations to set those cut offs.
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Well, this tally is a bit of a mess, but I think this is right
Edit: I like those neglected sub-votes, so
[X] Plan: Full Disclosure
[X] Full disclosure to mum about the Scavangers circumstances.
- [X] Explain that they are a bit like Utau, though they suffered under a much worse group than Easter.
-- [X] Mention that Manticore are part of the government, unlike Easter, but like JPs, and so they don't trust any officials.
--- [X] And unlike JPs, they are evil. Like Easter.
- [X] If possible, avoid telling her that Kana is a murderer. That doesn't seem like it would go down well.
[X] Go with Midori and Miki to check the Scavengers house for them using mental scan from the longest range it is viable.
[X] Whatever wins, do it decisively. Firm your resolve. Burn a WP point if you have to. If Kana needs you, she's needed you for over a week.
Edit: I like those neglected sub-votes, so
[X] Plan: Full Disclosure
[X] Full disclosure to mum about the Scavangers circumstances.
- [X] Explain that they are a bit like Utau, though they suffered under a much worse group than Easter.
-- [X] Mention that Manticore are part of the government, unlike Easter, but like JPs, and so they don't trust any officials.
--- [X] And unlike JPs, they are evil. Like Easter.
- [X] If possible, avoid telling her that Kana is a murderer. That doesn't seem like it would go down well.
[X] Go with Midori and Miki to check the Scavengers house for them using mental scan from the longest range it is viable.
[X] Whatever wins, do it decisively. Firm your resolve. Burn a WP point if you have to. If Kana needs you, she's needed you for over a week.
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Nero200
High Priest of Eito, Part Time Nyar.
I agree, updating mine to include the willpower part as well.
[X] Plan: Full Disclosure
[X] Full disclosure to mum about the Scavangers circumstances.
- [X] Explain that they are a bit like Utau, though they suffered under a much worse group than Easter.
-- [X] Mention that Manticore are part of the government, unlike Easter, but like JPs, and so they don't trust any officials.
--- [X] And unlike JPs, they are evil. Like Easter.
- [X] If possible, avoid telling her that Kana is a murderer. That doesn't seem like it would go down well.
[X] Go with Midori and Miki to check the Scavengers house for them using mental scan from the longest range it is viable.
[X] Whatever wins, do it decisively. Firm your resolve. Burn a WP point if you have to. If Kana needs you, she's needed you for over a week.
I agree.
[X] Plan: Full Disclosure
[X] Full disclosure to mum about the Scavangers circumstances.
- [X] Explain that they are a bit like Utau, though they suffered under a much worse group than Easter.
-- [X] Mention that Manticore are part of the government, unlike Easter, but like JPs, and so they don't trust any officials.
--- [X] And unlike JPs, they are evil. Like Easter.
- [X] If possible, avoid telling her that Kana is a murderer. That doesn't seem like it would go down well.
[X] Go with Midori and Miki to check the Scavengers house for them using mental scan from the longest range it is viable.
[X] Whatever wins, do it decisively. Firm your resolve. Burn a WP point if you have to. If Kana needs you, she's needed you for over a week.
[X] Plan: Full Disclosure
[X] Full disclosure to mum about the Scavangers circumstances.
- [X] Explain that they are a bit like Utau, though they suffered under a much worse group than Easter.
-- [X] Mention that Manticore are part of the government, unlike Easter, but like JPs, and so they don't trust any officials.
--- [X] And unlike JPs, they are evil. Like Easter.
- [X] If possible, avoid telling her that Kana is a murderer. That doesn't seem like it would go down well.
[X] Go with Midori and Miki to check the Scavengers house for them using mental scan from the longest range it is viable.
[X] Whatever wins, do it decisively. Firm your resolve. Burn a WP point if you have to. If Kana needs you, she's needed you for over a week.