Okay. So, first order of business: Not getting conscripted by any of the gangs. Getting conscripted means we lose access to the other gangs, cutting our supply of magical girls to a sixth what it could be. Getting conscripted probably also means all our pets die, one way or another, if only because we won't have enough freedom to take care of them. So this is unacceptable. Brainstorming our options:
- Publicize our ability to set up wards. The gangs' choices would then be a war to gain control of us, letting us protect everyone, or killing us immediately so we can't destabilize the political environment.
- As 1, but with mundane support: we get ourselves in the news and explicitly talk about our fears of being conscripted. All of a sudden, killing us or conscripting us puts the responsible group (and magical girls as a whole, really) in direct contention with mundane government.
- Contract with various groups to supply wards on the condition that they keep their hands off you. This doesn't work because conscripting us immediately, rather than contracting with us, is strictly superior for most of these organizations.
- As 3, but we request active protection instead of just grief seeds or neutrality. This is a much harder sell, and again, generally inferior to conscripting us. We'd have to back it up with some other incentives, like 2 or threatening to spark a war.
- Ward their houses without involving them at all. Use the hawks to find where magical girls live, lurk in alleys near their positions, leave wards on their living spaces without telling them anything at all. Too difficult and risky, and doing it without requesting any compensation at all raises questions about our motives and what we get out of it.
- As 3, but with direct NYPD support. Go to their office and tell them everything we know about the situation. They can't actually fight magical girl, but we might be able to convince them to send an officer with us, and I can't see any magical girls starting anything right in front of an officer. I'm not sure we'd actually be able to convince them to do that.
[] Go to the NYPD, clue them in about the impending reveal of magic and the fact that magical girl organizations range from "medieval fiefdom" to "totalitarian dictatorship" to "violent gang", and ask them to send an officer to observe your negotiations with other magical girls.
-[] You and the other magical girls involved gain legitimacy and safety, the NYPD get a foot in the door to a developing situation.
I think that attempting this doesn't actually lose us anything, interestingly. At worst they refuse and we have to fall back to something like 2, which is what we'd have been attempting anyway.
Maximizing chances of success...
@Alivaril, how cute are our pets? Are the dogs and cats at least surface-level normal, or would the "take your pets with you" options involve a squad of eerily-well-trained bear- and jaguar-equivalents?
What's special about these songbirds? Are they magical songbirds that can sing the dogs and cats back to being healthy? Does the colorful plumage and chirpy musical talent distract from the part where they're cunning spies? Or are they just incredibly cute birdies?
Kyubey has set up a truly monstrous little loop: as pain produces Grief, painful countermeasures to Grief will never work out in the long run. Short-term gains may be had, but long-term fatigue will cancel them over time.
So uh, how hard would it be to deal with the "painful" part of these painful countermeasures? I assume something just a bit beyond pulling out the
good drugs, but how far beyond?
. If a better way of making money exists than to cure chronic diseases, you can't think of it.
Being part of the US's nuclear deterrent, PC. The government subsidizes a meaningful fraction of the country's entire economy
just to preserve that capability. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like it's safe to publicize HH's mana-ramp capabilities, which means we don't have any way to get this information upwards. HH is also hard-capped on the ratio of income gained per mote spent warding, which means there's no way for them to feed us and get us kicked off faster, which would have been the key selling point for that strategy from the PoV of a national defense strategist.
