Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]

Quickshot0 · Apr 3, 2024

Well yeah, it would be hard to be nearly as sure in person... not like Amu knows everyone in JP, and JP uses mental defense techniques as well. So that too doesn't seem like a backdoor for her knowing such a thing.

But I figured it matters for our own personal perspectives on the matter. And this line of reasoning might at least help us figure it some what out for ourselves.

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

Quickshot0 said:
Another thing to mention on this is that you might need to travel a bit down mind heal, dream walking and possibly precog... in case that helps boosts Dia up more. (Dream walking is due to potentially needing to make spiritual matter to fill in gaps, rather then just steal it from others)

I guess if one was very radical one could also try to see how far one could go with retrocog. As in... could you find parts of a persons mind map if you could but see the past well enough. Or if one could study how each piece of damage occurred, could one traverse the reverse path with sufficient mind heal skill.

About that, right now, the one person we know who may have enough dots in Clairvoyance to do post-cognition well enough to map Yui's mind pre-abrasion is actually Tsukasa.

We know he has high levels in Precog but nothing about his skill in Clairvoyance - however, the QM mentioned that he could be a potential assistant for Utau's Ragged Crossroads and that's a post-cog skill. So I think the chances are decent he also has a good few levels in Clairvoyance. Whether that would be enough to map out Yui's mind from before remains to be seen. That's partly why I want to suggest offering to introduce them to Tsukasa.

I'm not sure that JP's has any Clairvoyants with that level of skill, or how willing they would be to help even if there were. QM mentioned that Hibiki Kuze might also be a potential assistant but unless something has radically changed from DeSu 2 canon, he's not (yet?) part of JP's and is currently just a normal high-school student with limited knowledge of the occult.

Of course, even if Tsukasa can help that still leaves needing to find people with high enough levels of Mind Control and Dreamwalking to assist..... and the people we know right now with the current highest levels in both are Kana and Yui themselves. And Kana already was confirmed to not have the skill level needed to do it, which is why she botched her previous attempt, so.... uh.... yeah.

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

PistachioCookies said:
Mind Control and Dreamwalking to assist..... and the people we know right now with the current highest levels in both are Kana and Yui themselves

Actually, Ami isn't exactly bad at this just looking at dot values, it's just that she doesn't have the experience Kana or even Amu has - maybe she can serve as a exceptional assistant down the line?

Shifting tracks back to the vote, we are, uh, sitting at one vote for each plan right now - what other issues do we need to hash out so we can come to a consensus?

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
Shifting tracks back to the vote, we are, uh, sitting at one vote for each plan right now - what other issues do we need to hash out so we can come to a consensus?

I thought you wanted to streamline that a bit more for being too long?

If it were me, I'd omit the last two bits that give direct instructions to Naoto and Utau, since I'd expect it's already given that if Amu needed protecting, they would automatically help to protect her and that Utau would also try to help Amu to talk-no-jutsu Kana if it looked like it was going downhill.

But otherwise, I'm fine to go with it.

[X] Plan Tricologe

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

PistachioCookies said:
I thought you wanted to streamline that a bit more for being too long?

Done. Still very long - reads like two updates worth of material, but I hope the contrast between general priorities/specifics if applicable where the two plans were merged will make it easier for the QM?

Tricky part of this vote is that we need to plan for multiple mutually exclusive scenarios now, because the next update likely will end after the fight resolves if things go poorly enough.

Enumerating them as best I can,
1) The Shadow's fundamental concept is around Kana's desire to live a normal life without being in the Scavengers.
(No other working theories right now for this, except for taking her Shadow's words at face value)

It seems a safe statement that Kana is monofocusing on her Shadow at least partially due to UMI, but the rest of the motives for doing so is unclear. Could it be
1) So that she will no longer harm others through her actions by going into a coma? (Filtered through UMI lenses)
2) Because she wants to remove her doubts about staying in Scavengers, lethally or through UMI; or she thinks she needs more surety to Do What Needs To Be Done
3) Actually, she wanted to do to herself what Asahi/Kana did to small Yui for some reason.

(Likely related to what Shadow Yui did if true, which we really need to find out because it likely formed the main thrust of Kana's current motivations.
Unless Yui has some kind of Midnight Channel related power or esoteric UMI abilities, it seems Kana got entangled in whatever scenario was going on back there like Utau could've, but since we don't know what happened over there there's nothing we can draw from this information)

4) Actually, Kana isn't thinking at all right now because of UMI.
5) Something else I don't have the imagination for?

Not a lot of common ground between this possible scenarios, so planning right now becomes a little of everything so long as they don't contradict each other.

Baughn said:
Um." He glanced around, seeing the lack of other people around. "It's just you, right?"

Baughn said:
his aura felt good, even if it was really turbulent

Baughn said:
Fetching lost kittens, on occasion.

I'm not sure whether the impression of him being tasked to fetch runaways back is due to having too much Tinfoil Hats on or if it has actual merit?

Baughn said:
And I don't want to be a killer anymore.

(I just noticed that Shadow Kana doesn't seem to be concerned about her potential death so much as what it theoretically means for actual Kana, which...)

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
2) Because she wants to remove her doubts about staying in Scavengers, lethally or through UMI; or she thinks she needs more surety to Do What Needs To Be Done

My feeling is that this is the main reason, based on the Shadow saying:

Baughn said:
"I made everything worse. And mom was going to throw her away. Even though half of her was Yui. ...that's when Naomi got to me."

Whatever Naomi did to convince Kana to run away with them and join the Scavengers, her Shadow clearly doesn't have a high opinion of it if it's using a negative phrase like "got to me" to describe it.

And if the Shadow isn't the part of Kana that agrees with Naomi, that means the incoming "normal" portion is likely going to be the part of herself that agrees with Naomi.

Now, we may not know exactly what Naomi did to convince her, but Naomi doesn't have UMI, just pyrokinesis - so probably not forceful brainwashing, but more traditional coercion with words and charisma. Most likely using guilt, first over Kana botching her soul surgery on Small Yui and then later from killing Riku and who knows how many others on the way out, convincing her she was in too deep to back out.

And if Kana thinks she's in too deep to back out, any thoughts of doing so like what her Shadow holds would be perceived as a weakness that needs to be stamped out.

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

PistachioCookies said:
Most likely using guilt, first over Kana botching her soul surgery on Small Yui

We know that her mom wanted to throw Small Yui away after enough failures, I wonder how that meshes with Kana deciding to leave the support structure** that is Manticore given her priority of supporting small Yui and potential guilt at the time?

PistachioCookies said:
And if Kana thinks she's in too deep to back out

Is it too late to back out though?
(That is, is somehow convincing Kana and small Yui to back out of Scavengers a desirable outcome?
If it is we might want to attack this line in particular in our plans)

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
We know that her mom wanted to throw Small Yui away after enough failures, I wonder how that meshes with Kana deciding to leave the support structure** that is Manticore given her priority of supporting small Yui and potential guilt at the time?

My guess?

Either Kana couldn't convince her mother to "keep" Small Yui and/or Naomi convinced Kana that Asahi would definitely dispose of Small Yui and that the only way to keep her alive was to grab her and run away with the other Scavengers.

Manticore support structure not really so helpful, if they refuse to actually support Small Yui the way Kana wants them.

quantum lurker said:
Is it too late to back out though?
(That is, is somehow convincing Kana and small Yui to back out of Scavengers a desirable outcome?
If it is we might want to attack this line in particular in our plans)

There's an elephant in the room I purposely didn't address up until now, which is Naomi.

Let's face it- Naomi is probably not going to let Kana simply back out, at least not if Kana just rocked up and asked her nicely. It might be possible, but would probably take a lot of bargaining and by "bargaining" I'm imagining stuff like offering a lifetime supply of those drugs plus new identities and fake passports for all the other Scavengers and a boatloat of money. We can't offer that at the moment.

I don't think it is a good idea for us to deliberately bring up Naomi to Kana at all if we can help it, Kana still regards her as a big sister and probably still wants to continue being friends with her.

Suggesting Naomi may be at fault or blamable for anything would probably be received as suggesting that Kana should betray Naomi and would effectively be Amu telling Kana to choose between 2 friends - Amu or Naomi.

IMO, that should be avoided if at all possible.

Skelm · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
Like? It's not (just) us questers you need to convince, it's Kana and "It's not paranoia if they are really out to get you" Naomi here.

As I mentioned in the same post, Manticore's experiments and the results thereof are indicative of a group that doesn't understand much about the cognitive or mental layers of reality. They seem to be at the level of blindly poking at things and writing down the results without a well of historical cases to draw on. By contrast the JPs know, for example, what the rift was, what to do about it, enough about the conditions of formation to say it couldn't have been (primarily) caused by Sayaa's outburst, I'm pretty sure we saw them with bound demons, and we definitely saw them with cognitive shields.

Further, they don't seem to have made any attempt to spirit people away as test subjects, even the comatose girl whose parents don't seem to care about her at all.

Finally, given their role as a government agency, I strongly suspect that Naoto has had her own interactions with them that would corroborate this.

Even in the small world of secret psionics and magicians, there's lots of room for two seperate groups. The likelihood of them being linked was just not that high to begin with, so it only takes a few observations of them not being linked to become confident that they aren't.

(To be clear, Manticore could absolutely be getting support from the JPs by lying)

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

Skelm said:
They seem to be at the level of blindly poking at things and writing down the results without a well of historical cases to draw on.

Yep, though if IC someone were inclined for hostile reads everything except for the cognitive shields and Manticore not having them could be explained away, probably?
I don't think we saw bound demons IC, and the rift thing can easily be excused with "trial and error in obscure places" depending on the reach of Manticore.
The conditions of formation bit can easily be explained by Common Sense too or simply "if it were that easy the world would have broke long before". (Again, I agree with you, but this is me trying to poke holes from the lens of someone super untrusting)

Skelm said:
Further, they don't seem to have made any attempt to spirit people away as test subjects, even the comatose girl whose parents don't seem to care about her at all.

IC Counterargument: It is because said people still had those that cared about them, and because comatose people are terrible test subjects they were fine?

(Though if we can write a reasoning solid to hostile reads that even if Manticore is getting support from JPs by lying, there still remains no scenario that Yui may be exposed to Manticore through JPs to the disadvantage of the other Scavengers we should be good to go?)

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

I originally thought that Manticore was a new player to the occult game due to the fact that their experiments appeared to revolve around Psionics, which we know was something that only started with Ikuto.

Then we learnt from the Persona Suppressors we found among Naomi's drugs that they were involved in Persona/Shadow research - which to be fair, is still a relatively new thing. AFAIK, all that stuff was only first delved into into in earnest by the Kirijo Group between 1995 and 1999 by Kouetsu Kirijo. If they were building off that research, Manticore might well have been less than 10 years old.

Now?

Knowing that Asahi was attempting to teach Yui magic/sorcery, there's a fair chance Manticore have been around for longer. I'm no longer quite as ready to assume that they don't have demon summoning capabilities anymore. Since if Asahi knew magic and was only middle-management, chances are the upper echelons know more, including how to bring in demons.

I have a vague guess that Manticore's "specialty" may actually be magic and the reason they don't have experience with Personas or Psionics is not because they are new, but because they are old. They are used to dealing with magic and not with other fields and have trouble adapting due to set ways - they may have tried prodding Yui with magic to fix her and it didn't work so well, because Personas and Shadows don't mix with raw Magatsuhi.

Skelm · Apr 3, 2024

PistachioCookies said:
Knowing that Asahi was attempting to teach Yui magic/sorcery, there's a fair chance Manticore have been around for longer. I'm no longer quite as ready to assume that they don't have demon summoning capabilities anymore. Since if Asahi knew magic and was only middle-management, chances are the upper echelons know more, including how to bring in demons.

If they knew how to summon demons they would be using that capability and the Scavengers would have seen it, either as defenders during their raids, or from Kana when she was still a member in good standing. The point of magical power is to do stuff with it, not just to sit on hoarded lore like a dragon nesting on gold.

Sorcery has existed for a long time, but that doesn't mean any group practicing it is old, it just means they could be old. But if they actually were old, that would have observable consequences. They probably wouldn't have screwed up on training a new person, for one thing (and I don't see any way they could have not been a genuine mistake, Asahi surely didn't want her daughter killed, and Manticore obviously wants new recruits to succeed instead of dying in an accident). We would see or hear about them using Sorcery successfully - again, the Scavengers would have either seen this in response to their raids or heard of it from Kana.

Further, while their psionic experiments are serious crimes, as far as we know just using magic isn't. If Manticore had a well developed magical practice, that should be an outer layer of the conspiracy onion: "Manticore is a normal company doing R&D" > "Manticore is the current face of a lineage of sorcerers" > "Manticore is kidnapping children to experiment on". But we've seen no indication of that middle layer.

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

Skelm said:
Asahi surely didn't want her daughter killed

I think Pistachio meant that there were adverse reactions between Shadows and Magic, and therefore this happened because Asahi wasn't aware of her daughter having enough of a Shadow to cause problems?

As for the rest, hard to gauge when we don't know how important the experiments here (and Scavenger raids) were to Manticore as a whole - could just be insufficient priority to warrant Magic/Demon guarding by those with the privilege to know about it and the willingness to actually do so,
because as mentioned in the Informational if you try Magic enough times you will eventually roll snake eyes/reach too far?

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

Skelm said:
If they knew how to summon demons they would be using that capability and the Scavengers would have seen it, either as defenders during their raids, or from Kana when she was still a member in good standing. The point of magical power is to do stuff with it, not just to sit on hoarded lore like a dragon nesting on gold.

They might have.

If Naomi, Aoi and Mimi didn't come back from their outing, that could be the reason why.

I know I mentioned a theory that the demon's at Amu's school may have interfered with Aoi's precognitive abilities, but that's only a theory.

It might have been demons, that were not the ones from Amu's school.

Skelm said:
They probably wouldn't have screwed up on training a new person, for one thing (and I don't see any way they could have not been a genuine mistake, Asahi surely didn't want her daughter killed, and Manticore obviously wants new recruits to succeed instead of dying in an accident).

This assumes there is, in fact, a "safe" known way to train new magicians that comes without a risk of mental abrasion whatsoever. There could be a high failure rate even with the "safest" known practices and Yui's accident wasn't particularly special.

....The other theory I had was that Overgrowth may have interfered with the usual training practices. Granted, we don't know whether Yui Nanami had Overgrowth prior to her accident (only Small Yui appears to have enough to be Psionic), but if she did, it's possible that it clashes with using magic and amplifies backlash on the user. Since Overgrowth is a recent thing, any established practices they had probably would not have been able to account for it.

Skelm · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
I think Pistachio meant that there were adverse reactions between Shadows and Magic, and therefore this happened because Asahi wasn't aware of her daughter having enough of a Shadow to cause problems?

But Shadows aren't new? And having one is almost universal? Studying them might be new, but insofar as just having a Shadow requires adjusting your approach to sorcery every old sorcery tradition has already dealt with this problem.

PistachioCookies said:
They might have.

If Naomi, Aoi and Mimi didn't come back from their outing, that could be the reason why.

What about the previous raids? And all of Kana's observations while working for them? Any theory about how Manticore works has to be able to explain those too.

PistachioCookies said:
This assumes there is, in fact, a "safe" known way to train new magicians that comes without a risk of mental abrasion whatsoever. There could be a high failure rate even with the "safest" known practices and Yui's accident wasn't particularly special.

This is likely true to an extent, but the main implication is that true pure sorcery traditions don't exist. Any tradition of magic worth studying and passing on would branch out from pure sorcery into things that mitigate those drawbacks. My understanding is that demon summoning is one such approach, where instead of casting all the spells yourself, you get something naturally suited to spell casting to do it for you. The fact that Manticore hasn't done this implies they don't have access to a useful magical tradition and are just trying to figure it out themselves.

"Yui tried to learn magic and ended up in a coma" is much better predicted by "Manticore is new to this and uses wildly dangerous training techniques because they don't know any better ones" then by "Manticore knows a lot about how to safely train people, and this was a genuinely unavoidable accident".

quantum lurker said:
As for the rest, hard to gauge when we don't know how important the experiments here (and Scavenger raids) were to Manticore as a whole - could just be insufficient priority to warrant Magic/Demon guarding by those with the privilege to know about it and the willingness to actually do so,
because as mentioned in the Informational if you try Magic enough times you will eventually roll snake eyes/reach too far?

And by the same reasoning, if Manticore is drawing on an old tradition of magic users, then they must have some way to make magic practical to use, which means we should see them using it on things important to them.

And it doesn't really make sense to say that these experiments aren't important and don't warrant magical assistance. If you're committing a bunch of serious crimes the results have to be important to you, or you wouldn't take the risk! And, again, being part of an old magical tradition is a less important secret then the fact that they kidnap children to experiment on. It just doesn't make sense to induct people into the child-kidnapping org and tell them enough about magic that they can get themselves hurt (this must have happened or Asahi couldn't have tried to teach Yui anything), but not tell them what you know about the right way(s) to do magic, or even to sternly warn them away from it as too dangerous to risk.

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

Skelm said:
If you're committing a bunch of serious crimes the results have to be important to you, or you wouldn't take the risk!

Baughn said:
There's a tendency to think that everyone involved with an 'evil organization' is themselves evil, but most people are just looking for a paycheck. For something like what Manticore is doing, the fewer people who know everything, the better.

Baughn, while we are on the topic of trying to figure out how old Manticore is, what is the mission statement/justification of Manticore as far as Kana is aware through Asahi?

I was wondering about how exactly Manticore got access to snipers willing to shoot and kill children, but if said children could be portrayed as "can wield magic/demon summoning with unknown upper limit and may be a bit crazy from whatever happened" Lelouch'ing other organisations to clean up for them does seem a lot easier than before.

Baughn · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
Baughn, while we are on the topic of trying to figure out how old Manticore is, what is the mission statement/justification of Manticore as far as Kana is aware through Asahi?

She wasn't too interested in the politics of it, and can't comment on that. But as for the mission statement, it's-

"To understand psionics, keep the Japanese public safe, and respond to any emergent psionics-related situations."

Quine · Apr 3, 2024

[X] Plan Tricologe

Mostly just voting this to make the vote unanimous, because, well... I'm getting bored of this. I want this arc to finish already.

quantum lurker said:
It seems a safe statement that Kana is monofocusing on her Shadow at least partially due to UMI, but the rest of the motives for doing so is unclear. Could it be
1) So that she will no longer harm others through her actions by going into a coma? (Filtered through UMI lenses)
2) Because she wants to remove her doubts about staying in Scavengers, lethally or through UMI; or she thinks she needs more surety to Do What Needs To Be Done
3) Actually, she wanted to do to herself what Asahi/Kana did to small Yui for some reason.
(Likely related to what Shadow Yui did if true, which we really need to find out because it likely formed the main thrust of Kana's current motivations.
Unless Yui has some kind of Midnight Channel related power or esoteric UMI abilities, it seems Kana got entangled in whatever scenario was going on back there like Utau could've, but since we don't know what happened over there there's nothing we can draw from this information) 4) Actually, Kana isn't thinking at all right now because of UMI.
5) Something else I don't have the imagination for?

Not a lot of common ground between this possible scenarios, so planning right now becomes a little of everything so long as they don't contradict each other.

I think there's a decent chance something drove a wedge between Little Yui and Kana recently. Maybe Kana's shadow said something hurtful to Yui, or Yui's shadow said something hurtful to Kana. Maybe Kana tried to act on one of her shadow's desires, and it went horribly wrong.

We just don't have enough information, unfortunately.

I hope Kana doesn't get mad about us ruining the Scavengers' OPSEC. It's not the biggest issue here, but some of the likely mindsets she could be in are ones where she would place more weight than usual on that point, and their OPSEC is pretty seriously compromised at this point.

Shadow Kana is never going to get what she wants. She wants her old life back, and short of large-scale reality reset effects or Dr. Maruki style cognition alteration, that's not going to happen. Even if she fixes Yui, even if she fixes both Yuis, her relationship with her sister will never be what it was. No matter how things end up (or ended) with Asahi, she'll never get back the mother she once thought she had. She'll never get back the years spent in hiding. She'll never get back the innocence lost to her experiences as a Manticore collaborator or as a Scavenger. She'll never unsee the things she's seen or undo the things she's done.

We can't offer her her dreams. The best we can really offer on that front is catharsis.

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

Skelm said:
What about the previous raids? And all of Kana's observations while working for them? Any theory about how Manticore works has to be able to explain those too.

I think it got implied that Kana kept the memories of the violence and the raids hidden from Amu whenever they did telepathy. So it is possible that they DID run into magic users then as well and that Amu just never knew about it.

Bear in mind that Kana, having been trained by her mother, likely ALSO knows how to use magic and Amu never found out until now.

If the Scavengers never ran into actual demons until now, it could well be because they just weren't a big enough nuisance to send anyone with demon summoning knowledge to handle them until this point. They might have run into demons too, for all we know.

Skelm said:
The fact that Manticore hasn't done this implies they don't have access to a useful magical tradition and are just trying to figure it out themselves.

Or alternatively the exact opposite - they are just extremely old-school, pure traditionalists. They've worked with pure sorcery for generations and don't put stock into magi-tech or "new" branches of magic. Their specialty is, specifically "sorcery", the grassroots kind.

They might've been happy leaving stuff like magi-tech to other organizations like JP's and lack experience dealing with Psionics or Personas, because they simply generally don't bother messing around with it.

Baughn said:
"To understand psionics, keep the Japanese public safe, and respond to any emergent psionics-related situations."

Well, if this is their mission statement..... it seems more likely they are new and any magic-users they have got pulled in from other organizations.

Quine said:
She wants her old life back, and short of large-scale reality reset effects or Dr. Maruki style cognition alteration, that's not going to happen.

Careful, this is SMT3 we're talking about. Reality reset is an actual thing. Even if Kagutsuchi would prefer the new world to be more different that just "the same, except with one family being happier".

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

Baughn said:
keep the Japanese public safe

Makes me wonder why they aren't collaborating with JPs then, since JPs are a actual government agency (if not publicly known); and yet have enough threat level to be a significant problem to Amu even when she can actually handle them in a direct confrontation?

Like, if they treat their mission statement seriously at all Amu is probably already on their radar; and they also know Other Competent People handled the situation Amu got into by now.
Or is that why Naomi and co got into trouble, because JPs started sharing mental shields to them after they reached out?

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
Or is that why Naomi and co got into trouble, because JPs started sharing mental shields to them after they reached out?

.....How do we know it's not the other way around?

That the shields weren't developed by Manticore and they were the ones who shared them with JP's?

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

PistachioCookies said:
That the shields weren't developed by Manticore and they were the ones who shared them with JP's?

JPs used them for what amounts to every Tom, Dick and Harry present in the base - how do you explain the people and scientists (the ones doing the Illegal Stuff they'd rather not have leaked, and also would rather not have Mind Crush'd) not having them in previous raids, surely JPs and Manticore don't have that large a resource disparity?

===

Now that the vote tally timer has started, does anyone at all have any violent objections to the wording in my plan (I made changes while merging to incorporate my understanding of the discussion so far)?
After all, now is a good time to point out any potential minefields this may step on, before they potentially blow up and leave us doing damage control next update.

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
JPs used them for what amounts to every Tom, Dick and Harry present in the base - how do you explain the people and scientists not having them in previous raids, surely they don't have that large a resource disparity?

You wondered if Naomi got in trouble because of the shields, if that is the case, the shields are new. And could have been new for JP's too, no reason to assume JP's had them earlier than the attack on Amu's school.

PistachioCookies · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
After all, now is a good time to point out any potential minefields this may step on, before they potentially blow up and leave us doing damage control next update.

.....Please scrap any mention of Naomi.

The less we bring her up, the better our chances of not triggering normal Kana's Big Sister Complex.

Yeah, Kana is very liable to bring her up anyway, but no need to make it easier to set fire to that pile of dynamite.

quantum lurker · Apr 3, 2024

quantum lurker said:
After all, now is a good time to point out any potential minefields this may step on, before they potentially blow up and leave us doing damage control next update.

PistachioCookies said:
Yeah, Kana is very liable to bring her up anyway, but no need to make it easier to set fire to that pile of dynamite.

I'd say controlled demolition is a thing, but I don't actually think we can do that in this context, nor believe that is a desirable result to begin with so...

[X] Plan Tricologe
-[X] Amu:
--[X] Make cake and chocolate milk, like we had with Kana the day we first met. Offer her some.
--[X] Ask for her side of the story. Listen to it.
--[X] Emphasize her self-worth, and the legitimacy of her feelings. (Not just the feelings she's suppressing, either.
--[X] Tell Kana that it isn't wrong to want to not to have to fight or hurt people or save them or even be a good person. Tell her it also isn't wrong wanting to fight, hurt and save people. It's fine for someone to want both at once.
---[X] Show Kana telepathically the fight you had at Nikaidou's lab long ago. Amu, as Amulet Heart with Ran, wanted nothing more than to brain Nikaidou with a heavy rod for kidnapping her Charas. But Su wanted to help him instead, to heal and save him despite his sins. Despite differing mindsets, neither parts of Amu were "wrong".
--[X] Chara-change in turn with Ran and Su, displaying the proof that it is fine for someone to want to be 2 or even 3 or more different things at once: After all, you and Utau live it every day, and surely both of us examplify this being ok?
--[X] Remind Kana you didn't give up on Utau, despite everything she did, and you won't give up on Kana either. So if Kana doesn't want to give up on her mother too despite everything, that's also fine. Whatever she decides, you'll help and be with her to the best of your ability.
--[X] There may be a way to heal Yui, if she wants to try, but it will require Kana's willing help.
---[X] Show Kana how you retrieved your own fragments from the Road of Stars - Ran, Miki and Su - and offer to either lend her Dia's assistance or put her in touch with Tsukasa, who seems to have his own way of getting there, to try the same thing.
--[X] In the meantime, we can try to help you take care of Yui after you teach us how, if you think you need some time off without having to be so worried about her?
--[X] Let Naoto take the lead in the event of a fight

Wording and ordering of the second half has changed, let me know if I'm writing a cheque we can't cash, or am choosing poor wording with this.

Shards of a Broken Sun [Megaten/Shugo Chara/Exalted]

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