I doubt it. Sun Liling might be in the army, but she is not the most likely. The most likely are in fact Han Jian's group. I mean, I get you find Sun Liling cool, but even beyond Han Jian' group there is Ji Rong that most likely will be there. Li Suyin is a possible too. Sun Liling is... less so.
You musta missed my post just above yours, so I'll just give a nod to your points and beg you not to split my post up like that again, it's not that spaghetti posting will bring down the wrath of the mods, but it is kind of annoying to have to answer point by point like that so I'll just take a respond to this one.
You're going to have to explain the Han Jian going to the battlefield with us thing though. He's an upper noble, as are, it appears, most of his peers. Unless they have a tradition of serving with the Empire for a few years (possible, Han Jian's grandfather was a general, iirc?), Li Suyin's very obvious social combat inclinations seems to suggest that they're headed back to play the game of thrones. It's possible that, like American presidents before Obama, there's a stigma associated with nobles who have never served in a military capacity (Zhou seems to disparage them quite a bit), but I don't think it's
necessarily true that they're coming with us.
For Suyin... I suspect there's a medical corps and that Suyin will be a shoe in to go in that group. Given how rare healing seems to be, and how high level you need to be to do substantial healing, doctors are
way too precious to waste on the battlefield. She could be with us, but not in a combat capacity unless shit had hit the fan (shit will hit the fan).
Wait ... that was a joke?
In all seriousness, our ability to help Meizhen form alliances and create a power block in the upper echelons of the class is going to heavily rely on either getting to know more people and creating additional social links or getting Meizhen to form an alliance with Han Jian and his company. Right now I'm not seeing us being able to do either, as an alliance with the Bai family is an alliance against the current regime. What we can do, is become one of the four most important people in our class by getting strong enough. If we can manage to get up to Bai Meizhen's level of power, then the political game in this class of the sect becomes a lot more interesting.
We would be the wild card without any history or strong family alliances. Which means that whichever side of the pseudo-triangle (Cai, Bai, Sun) we support will get an advantage in any fight against the other part of the triangle. This creates a need for the other two parts of the triangle to form up and then power blocks would form around each alliance. Unfortunately, the Bai family is not very popular and so a Cai/Sun alliance would garner a lot more of the lower level support amongst the class.
Of course this is all from the top of my head without any support at all, but this could be a plausible way divisions in the class grow over the next year if we are able to get that strong in that amount of time.
It was a joke in the same sense that I'll toss out ideas that I think are pretty awesome, narrative-wise
, but won't get any traction from the general voting population. This particular idea was even less well thought-out than usual because it requires a certain character-type to call someone out in a duel that they know they will lose because it's a) the right thing to do and b)
appears to be the right thing to do, and Ling Qi isn't quite at that level of political savvy matched to self-assurance and self-righteousness/moral integrity.
In the current vote one of her main thoughts was simply:
run.
She'll fall apart even considering the idea of calling Sun Liling out, like, we've played her as a bit of a coward unless backed into a corner, and/or defending her friends, and that reflects upon the thoughts she thinks and the options she considers legitimate. Calling Sun Liling out? Mmm, no. Not as she is right now. Ling Qi is in this to win this, she won't go around doing things for the sake of
appearances.
At best, I think, would be going to Sun Liling and asking her, very politely, why she attacked Bai Meizhen. Trying to put into practice what Gu Xiulang preached, in essence. I would be for that option, because it means that she'd start to become the sort of person that can attempt social combat and maybe even eventually call people out in duels.
The problem is our action economy: would we really be willing to blow an action slot trying to talk to Sun Liling? Would Sun Liling respect that sort of strength? These are all question marks, but it might be worth considering.
The main problem, as I see it, for any future plan of
world sect domination, is that our current understanding of the power dynamics of our year group is still incomplete. The people who have stood out to us are the girls. We still don't know who the strongest boys are, largely, I suspect, because it's not relevant to Ling Qi. Girls are potential threats, they can attack you in your own home, boys, on the other hand, just have to be avoided so she mostly dismisses them as irrelevant until they become relevant, like Huang Da did. It's pretty egregious: Zhou's class only had a handful of girls to begin with and we apparently knew almost all of them (that were strong), whereas despite having a lot of boys in the class we pretty much knew no one by name except for our Han Jian social circle, Gan Guangli who was friendly to her, and, uh, the other guy whose name I forget.
Like, I think she's been training with 30 people every day for 2 months and while she vaguely recalls some of the people currently fighting her, she doesn't even remember their
names. With how heartbreakingly scared she was of Bai Meizhen in the update, yrsillar's communicating pretty clearly that Ling Qi pretty much still sees the world through threat assessments.
We can't go for kingmaker actions with an outlook like that, even if our inclination towards support arts would make that a nice, thematic route to success.
I don't think we even need a mercy vote for the next update, no. This is an attack against us and our friend after we're injured. We need to make an example of them, something a step further then what we did before. It's annoying, but we have to escalate.
You know, provided we win.
The whole 'even strip their clothes' things sounds appropriate, because we simply can't tolerate this happening to us, and even if this is really an attack on Meizhen, something I'm not entirely convinced about, they've claimed it was at us.
We have to go to the next level - stripping them, or breaking a few bones, or something to drive home how not ok we are with this. We would prefer people fight us in an open and honest manner (even if we aren't intending to do the same. Because hypocrisy is only bad when other people do it), and so we have to escalate.
The problem is, they already have eight people attacking us. If we come out of this in one piece and start doing things that are obviously wrong like kicking people while they are down, what are we gonna do if, say, Gan Guangli walks up to us and says: "I understand you are angry Ling Qi and that their behavior will shame their houses, but this is wrong and I think you know it is wrong."
The ability to escalate depends on them not being able to immediately escalate in turn. As is, we're probably drawing a crowd who wants to see Bai Meizhen cowed. We win and take our winnings, that's tough, but that's business as usual. We start trying to kneecap people? Others will be quite justified in trying to interfere, because, wow, we are actually kind of doing bad guy things and eight people aren't just eight mook-level scrubs, they'll have their own support networks and friends and so on.
