How... restrained and reasonable of you. I don't think that will win, though...
I'll just have to hope I can win by merit of arguments alone in spite of feeling already kind of tired and having some other stuff to do!
Seriously though, there are several good reasons not to take any of the other options and I feel like people picking two or three is largely motivated by the desire to just see something happen, which honestly is a very suboptimal way to arrive at any decision in a situation as delicate as ours.
That Nilul's plan sounds fun is an
absolutely horrible reason to choose it.
There are no free choices here, our enemies are powerful and will not give us quarter and material wealth that ultimately pales against anything Zao could provide if we really needed it doesn't seem like all that attractive a reward.
Even when a lot of people were jumping on the revelry wagon because it sounded so fun, there were at least several very good reasons to do so.
The same can hardly be said here.
We'd be heavily straining our already rather easily strained cover story, putting all of our friends into more danger through their closer association with us, further alienating ourselves from our House and its allies and, regardless of how forgiving the Stress mechanic actually ends up being, we'd be depriving ourselves of one safe pick later on.
We have important shit to do.
Passing with flying colours alone will cost us 5 actions, we only get 6 actions free and with more updates and chances for plot XP we'll also be required to pick heavy training later on which only leaves a handful of slots open for events like these.
Blowing one of these on something with so many downsides just because it sounds fun (and as if
any of the other events involving Nilul Rihaku will be dangling in front of our eyes and we'll inevitably have to turn down
won't sound fun *sigh*) is the height of folly.
We can have actions about reconnecting with our friends, paying back Nilul for her help and making things up to Saery for Uly being a dick, ridiculous shenanigans and all that other stuff that will be
far more sensible when enough time has passed that any kind of 'reconciliation' is even remotely reasonable and we are much more powerful and therefor much more capable of dealing with the negative attention we'll be bringing down on our friends.
The mission with Ivory runs into similar issues.
We have chosen Power & Security for the Power & Security it offers while we power up, so lets actually take advantage of that.
Certainly we'll start to include more interseting options than training later on, but that can at the very least wait until we're more powerful since there is next to no reason to front-load our stress expenditure when we will be ridiculously more capable of accomplishing things during these excursions later on.
We have a large enough XP buffer that we could do two months of pure training before we have to go look for Plot XP and squeeze XP out of further updates so we should really use these first two months to build up a Stress buffer as well.
