Thanks go to
@Nero200 for quick review, incidentally, not that there was that much to review. For everyone else—I want to stress, again, that this is voting on the tone of the quest for the foreseeable future. If you're reading, and I can see a number of people are, then you should
probably vote.
No stress.
Easily resolved as a question,
@Baughn is it possible to be more peripherally involved?
Technically? Physically speaking? Yes, but it would be a fine line to tread.
Amu—at thirteen, at any rate—is reasonably proactive. Less so here than in canon, but Jewel Joker aside... she's not great at proactively searching for information. Yes? Except the aforementioned failure landed Kana in her current situation, and she's consciously adjusting for it. Being thirteen, it doesn't take much work.
What I'm trying to say is, it would be difficult to keep her partially involved because Amu won't want to. The more she learns, the more she'll want to learn; and that almost inevitably lands you on the
[X] SMT side of this particular vote. You'd get the darkness without whatever benefits come from it... at that point I might almost recommend you vote to go all in, instead.
If you pick the Shugo Chara side instead, then JPs might still ask for a loan of the Humpty Lock. They would not likely ask for Amu's direct help, however, because Amu is not known to be any sort of mind-healer... and isn't one, in fact; she'd be figuring it out in realtime. Which, in fairness to her, she might well pull off.
Even if she doesn't go out of her way to get information on their plans and simply initially defaults to taking care of patients instead of being present directly in raids, she would almost certainly be talking to the casualties and victims she treats and getting information out of them - especially so if she's trying to repair mental damage, since that's direct access to their memories right there. Chances are, some of these patients are almost inevitably going to be JPs agents who got injured and some of them are going to be looser-lipped than they should be, doubly-so if they're drugged up on painkillers.
Let's not pretend there isn't a good chance one of these sessions won't end with Amu feeling like she should be doing more to prevent the casualties, as opposed to just cleaning up afterwards, and then getting a vote option to try and increase her involvement with the whole thing.
She'd be hanging around. Again, she isn't known to be a mind-healer (because she isn't), but in this situation there's a lot more opportunities for her to learn.
Could she do it? Maybe. But I'd say that falls under "recipe for disaster".
If we just show up for an op, we prove ourselves a loose cannon, a security risk, and a liability. We have no place in their battle plan or their combat doctrine. We don't know how to work with them, and they don't know how to work with us. They'll be trying to get us out of there, and if we insist, they'll be stuck trying to babysit a civilian through the whole thing.
I was thinking of social 'forcing', first and foremost. If Amu insists strongly enough that she can be useful, and should go along, then... I may have a less apocalyptically focused Hotsuin here, but he's still
Hotsuin. He'll likely give her a chance, and enough training to not get in the way, and would predictably be impressed. He's also in a good position to override the people who'll try to explain that a thirteen-year-old should not be doing this.
