In Thunder's Echo (Legend of the Five Rings Quest)

[mothematics]

"Well, you seem to understand the potential risks, and I cannot ask for more." He allows, making another move on the Go board. "I might advise you to keep an eye on Sekawa-san, however."

You pause, holding your own playing piece in your hand. "The Kakita duelist?"

"Indeed. If I am not mistaken, he is quite smitten with his old childhood friend." Chen says, unashamedly enjoying himself. "I do hope you won't let something like that discourage you."

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... so we just might--I say might--want to start pumping our Iaijutsu or Void.

(More seriously there's absolutely no chance of us winning an Iaijutsu duel versus a Kakita but... we better start breaking the situation down there because True Love in Rokugan is baaaaaaaaad.)

"It is... my uncle, samurai-sama." She says uncertainly. "The one who works at the Theater? He has been arrested by the magistrates. They will not tell me what for, but I am sure he is innocent - he is a loyal man, and has never broken a law in his life. Please, can you do something?"

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Hm. Can we get a Lore check, @Maugan Ra, about what usually goes down at this kind of place?

 

[Hydroplatypus]

What we want here is probably to say something noncommittal but reassuring. Having a servant in our pocket could be very useful, but if we have to earn the magistrate's wrath to acquire it, it might not be worth it. So nothing that locks us into helping her, but something that'll give her hope nonetheless.

 

[The Laurent]

Hmm, @Maugan Ra , can be buy Investigation now or the like, or is it too convenient? Because I think the best thing to do would be to promise to look into the situation.

Look into the situation would thus mean if we find out, I dunno, he's actually guilty, we can say 'sorry about that, but...'

Do a little investigating of our own, or something?

 

[Sirrocco]

Most excellent. Handling this may require some delicacy, but could pay real dividends. Helping the little people is *often* worthwhile, from the Scorpion point of view.

We're going to want lore checks, though (possibly aided by questions as to the particulars). In particular, knowing when he was taken, what's likely to happen to him, and how soon are all valuable and important details. Is this a case where if we don't do something tonight the man is going to be executed come the dawn, or a case where he was arrested a month ago, and we can afford to develop a relationship with the magistrates over the course of a few meetings before bringing it up as diplomatically as possible?

If it's the "must act before dawn" situation, though... I'm not certain we can afford to help her. We're already about to go in beside Otomo-sama, and needing to balance their opinion of us there versus how we act in front of him without really knowing the situation beforehand. We also have (socially speaking) little to no justifiable reason to intervene on this man's behalf - again meaning that introductions beforehand are a good idea. It's the sort of thing that we could bring up in the right sort of way as part of an ongoing conversation about other things (when Otomo-sama isn't there) but having it be the reason for a visit might be awkward, unless we want "Soshi Naoto, champion of the little people" to be a well-known part of our reputation rather than something that's just quietly spread about among the help (probably best to avoid). Compassion is a part of honor, and we could justify it under that light, but it would also be acting *weird* (especially for the Lion).

Hmm, @Maugan Ra , can be buy Investigation now or the like, or is it too convenient? Because I think the best thing to do would be to promise to look into the situation.

Look into the situation would thus mean if we find out, I dunno, he's actually guilty, we can say 'sorry about that, but...'

Do a little investigating of our own, or something?

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We can't buy investigation right now not because it's too convenient, but because getting the next level of investigation costs two exp, and we only have one banked.

 

[Felius]

Also, ouch, good thing she's a peasant and thus kinda slightly excused from certain norms, otherwise the scandal would be outrageous. It's already a nightmare if it becomes known, because seriously, asking help from a minor samurai from another clan to intervene against your own clan in some manner? Holy shit! Also, damn doesn't that paint a sad picture: The girl is more willing to go ask the sinister samurai from the designated villain clan than from one of her own lords. The Lions are jerks to their commoners.

 

[mothematics]

Also, ouch, good thing she's a peasant and thus kinda slightly excused from certain norms, otherwise the scandal would be outrageous. It's already a nightmare if it becomes known, because seriously, asking help from a minor samurai from another clan to intervene against your own clan in some manner? Holy shit! Also, damn doesn't that paint a sad picture: The girl is more willing to go ask the sinister samurai from the designated villain clan than from one of her own lords. The Lions are jerks to their commoners.

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Every Clan and family has their darker sides. The Matsu are utterly fearless and insane in combat. They also are incredibly cruel to their peasants.

If she went to one of her lords she would likely be killed for it.

 

[Dirtnap]

The Lions are jerks to their commoners.

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really the only ones that treat their peasants decently are the Crab (Ashigaru are pulled up from the common ranks) and I think the Mantis.

And by decently i mean not executing them when they forget the smallest of things.

 

[mothematics]

really the only ones that treat their peasants decently are the Crab (Ashigaru are pulled up from the common ranks) and I think the Mantis.

And by decently i mean not executing them when they forget the smallest of things.

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That's sorta kinda true. The thing about the Crab is that, in all things, they think only of the war that they are ever fighting. This mentality, to an extent, is applicable to their commoners; everyone pitches in and the Crab aren't about to say "no, no you are no Samurai fuck off" to able bodied workers. Their lords share many things with their peasants.

With the Mantis, their perpetual underdog mentality (i.e. "fuck you we'll make it on our own") means that they have long been nice to peasants because, yes, they are their lords and will slap the shit out of anyone disrespectful, but they also believe anyone can climb to any heights. It's ingrained into their identity. This is why peasants cheer when the Mantis take them on.

There's also the Unicorn who are just all around approaching decent human beings

 

[Sirrocco]

really the only ones that treat their peasants decently are the Crab (Ashigaru are pulled up from the common ranks) and I think the Mantis.

And by decently i mean not executing them when they forget the smallest of things.

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- The Unicorn are actually pretty nice to theirs - they have the virtue of compassion, after all, and a semi-gaijin perspective that deosn't emphasize the samurai/heimen split quite so much.
- The Crab pretty much respect everyone who's willing to do their part, and are keenly aware of their logistics. Heimen don't get as much respect as samurai, but that's because they cant' do as much.
- The Scorpion frequently find heimen useful one way and another - they ahve eyes and ears, and are often both ignored and oppressed by the other clans, making them easy to influence. What's not to like? They tend to give their commoners more freedom to move and act than normal, but are willing to punish them horribly enough when they screw up to effectively rule through fear. You do well, all is good. You do poorly? Well, we can always find another twenty commoners.

The Mantis I don't know so much about. I suspect the Dragon may also be more decent about such things than most, what with the heavy focus on enlightenment.

 

[gman391]

The Dragon population is such that it doesn't really have the numbers to just throw people away. In particular it takes in a lot of orphans into their monasteries in order to give them a home. Sometimes they end up Togashi even.

So it's less that they go out of their way to take care of the peasants and more that they don't act rashly than anything.

Although honestly the Sparrow are probably the most tightly entwined samurai group with heimin.

 

[A Nation's Virtue]

... so we just might--I say might--want to start pumping our Iaijutsu or Void.

(More seriously there's absolutely no chance of us winning an Iaijutsu duel versus a Kakita but... we better start breaking the situation down there because True Love in Rokugan is baaaaaaaaad.)

Hm. Can we get a Lore check, @Maugan Ra, about what usually goes down at this kind of place?

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I'm pretty sure he's also a Kenshinzen, meaning he's at least at Insight Rank 5...I don't think pumping either is going to help us in this situation. :[

 

[A Nation's Virtue]

As for the matter of the heimin girl, I think the only real course of action is to promise to look into the matter and help him if he is truly innocent. We do intend to get a start on having our own informants in the Lion, and this is honestly the best way to get a start I feel.

 

[mothematics]

I'm pretty sure he's also a Kenshinzen, meaning he's at least at Insight Rank 5...I don't think pumping either is going to help us in this situation. :[

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Um. It was stated he's a recent graduate of the dojo (IIRC)? Which means there's basically no way that should be possible unless this kid is actually like, Kakita's time-capsuled son.

 

[Dirtnap]

As for the matter of the heimin girl, I think the only real course of action is to promise to look into the matter and help him if he is truly innocent. We do intend to get a start on having our own informants in the Lion, and this is honestly the best way to get a start I feel.

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What a coincidence we just agreed to go see the magistrates with the Imperial dude.

 

[A Nation's Virtue]

Um. It was stated he's a recent graduate of the dojo (IIRC)? Which means there's basically no way that should be possible unless this kid is actually like, Kakita's time-capsuled son.

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I'm pretty sure that when the Crane delegation was first introduced it was mentioned that there was a Kakita Kenshinzen with them.

EDIT: Nvm, it was just me derping.

 

[mothematics]

I'm pretty sure that when the Crane delegation was first introduced it was mentioned that there was a Kakita Kenshinzen with them.

EDIT: Nvm, it was just me derping.

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That makes no sense on the face of it; and I just looked in the thread. Nobody has mentioned the Kenshinzen until this page.

Kakita Sekawa, on the other hand, seems to be an old friend of hers from her youth. He is a relatively recent graduate from the Kakita School, taking his gempukku only four years ago. She has heard that his sensei have praised him as one of their finest students, but has never seen him duel, and is instead more knowledgeable about his deep interest in the theater (apparently he prefers kabuki to noh, though you have only a general understanding of the distinctions between the two).

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From 2.11. I think you just recalled incorrectly. No big deal.
E-I missed your ediiiiiiit sorry ._.

 

[Sirrocco]

[x] "I will see what I can do, but I will need information. Any you could give me would be useful. Do you know when he was arrested, or anything of the circumstances? Did the magistrate tell you anything at all?"

Just realized... dear uncle may be the guy that Pale Oak was heading into town to meet. This could get... messy.

Especially if Pale Oak *is* wrapped up in this, we may be glad that we upped our Sincerity skill.

 

[Dark as Silver]

Also, ouch, good thing she's a peasant and thus kinda slightly excused from certain norms, otherwise the scandal would be outrageous. It's already a nightmare if it becomes known, because seriously, asking help from a minor samurai from another clan to intervene against your own clan in some manner? Holy shit! Also, damn doesn't that paint a sad picture: The girl is more willing to go ask the sinister samurai from the designated villain clan than from one of her own lords. The Lions are jerks to their commoners.

Click to shrink...

Its probably also because we have gone out of our way to be polite to everyone.

 

[Bommelom]

[x] "I will see what I can do, but I will need information. Any you could give me would be useful. Do you know when he was arrested, or anything of the circumstances? Did the magistrate tell you anything at all?"

 

[Maugan Ra]

... so we just might--I say might--want to start pumping our Iaijutsu or Void.

(More seriously there's absolutely no chance of us winning an Iaijutsu duel versus a Kakita but... we better start breaking the situation down there because True Love in Rokugan is baaaaaaaaad.)

Hm. Can we get a Lore check, @Maugan Ra, about what usually goes down at this kind of place?

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Lore (Law) 5k4 = 54. OK, Naoto has a strong understanding of general legal principles.

So, in Rokugan the primary factor in a criminal trial is testimony. Actual physical evidence is reduced secondary importance at best, and magistrates only look for the most obvious of physical clues when searching a scene.

Since Rokugan is a strongly hierarchical culture, testimony from different people has different weight. If a samurai says one thing and a heimin says another, legally the samurai is in the right by default and there is nothing that the heimin can do to contest that.

If a peasant is arrested, they will generally be questioned on some topic, and possibly tortured (by hinin while the samurai watch). Wren's uncle likely has no direct legal recourse - it's all a matter of what he can be persuaded to say and whether his samurai patron/lord feels inclined to support him. His chances depend pretty much entirely on what he was arrested for and whose testimonyprompted such a thing.

Hmm, @Maugan Ra , can be buy Investigation now or the like, or is it too convenient? Because I think the best thing to do would be to promise to look into the situation.

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Finding out that you need to investigate something and thus trying to immediately buy ranks in Investigation is exactly the sort of thing I'm looking to prevent, generally speaking.

That said, you do have one rank already and don't have the banked xp to buy another, so.

Also, ouch, good thing she's a peasant and thus kinda slightly excused from certain norms, otherwise the scandal would be outrageous. It's already a nightmare if it becomes known, because seriously, asking help from a minor samurai from another clan to intervene against your own clan in some manner? Holy shit! Also, damn doesn't that paint a sad picture: The girl is more willing to go ask the sinister samurai from the designated villain clan than from one of her own lords. The Lions are jerks to their commoners.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, Wren is choosing to risk her life here, in hopes of finding someone willing and able to help her uncle. The Matsu would be incredibly unforgiving if they found out - if nothing else because it implies she does not trust and respect the honour of their magistrates.

I'm pretty sure he's also a Kenshinzen, meaning he's at least at Insight Rank 5...I don't think pumping either is going to help us in this situation. :[

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Not a Kenzishen, no. There's only a hundred of those in the Empire at the best of times, and rather fewer right now, what with the Clan Wars.

 

[remulian]

Funnily enough , the Scorpions for being the designated Villain Clan are also probably the ones who are more stereotypically apt to get to the truth than most others.

So we might add smart to the list of characteristics of the girl for deducing that.

 

[Sirrocco]

Funnily enough , the Scorpions for being the designated Villain Clan are also probably the ones who are more stereotypically apt to get to the truth than most others.

So we might add smart to the list of characteristics of the girl for deducing that.

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Actually, the Kitsuki of the Dragon are, at least later on in the OTL. The Kitsuki method is this strange thing that involves "evidence". People aren't really sure what to do with it, really. Given that the Kitsuki hadn't made it into the card game by this point, I'm not at all sure what there status is currently. Regardless, we don't have any of them *here*, so your point still holds, more or less.

The whole thing is an honor-based system. It's not about "justice" as we would like to believe in it, it's about the fact that Rokugan breeds people on a power scale that goes all the way up to "god-killer" and is trying to maintain a functional society. At a core level, then, strong differences of opinion are managed in duels. If you win the duel, you're presenting a convincing argument that you're a more powerful combatant than the other guy, and thus that your contribution to the well-being of the state is more important than his (and if he goes crazy and starts killing people, you yourself could stop him, while the opposite is not true). By extension, they should accept your interpretation over his, because pissing him off is safer than pissing you off. Justice is similar. Higher-ranking individuals tend to be more powerful combatants (and/or able to call upon better duelists) and therefore their word bears more weight, because the main point of the justice system is to maintain something resembling peace and order, and the way to maintain peace and order is to keep the important people happy.

Obviously, it has a number of other important moving parts, and it's had a *lot* of cruft build up around it - otherwise we wouldn't have courtiers. Still, the general idea of the society is that it's designed to channel the energies of tremendously powerful samurai and shugenja. (As a side note, *our* justice system is at its core designed to keep people in general satisfied enough with the proceedings that they don't go out for revenge, with a particular focus on avoiding mob-based revenge.)

 

[Kelenas]

So, depending on what happened to her uncle; what are our actual options, here?

 

[Pipeman]

So, depending on what happened to her uncle; what are our actual options, here?

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Odds are we're more or less limited to either getting the initial accuser to back down (unlikely given that we're probably dealing with a Matsu here) or getting a higher ranking Lion invested in defending the accusee (and unless we find a Lion that actually cares about this heimin for some reason odds are we'd have to trade favours or blackmail for this to happen), but the core difficulty here is likely to be that we can't let it get out that we interfered with this internal matter, that we can't let it get out that Wren asked us in the first place and that we don't really want to spend too many resources or make serious enemies in the process, which is why the straight up blackmail approach is probably more of a last resort.

 

[Sirrocco]

Odds are we're more or less limited to either getting the initial accuser to back down (unlikely given that we're probably dealing with a Matsu here) or getting a higher ranking Lion invested in defending the accusee (and unless we find a Lion that actually cares about this heimin for some reason odds are we'd have to trade favours or blackmail for this to happen), but the core difficulty here is likely to be that we can't let it get out that we interfered with this internal matter, that we can't let it get out that Wren asked us in the first place and that we don't really want to spend too many resources or make serious enemies in the process, which is why the straight up blackmail approach is probably more of a last resort.

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Rokugan does permit that people might be mistaken, and we have no current reason to believe that the accuser is particularly above our station. If we come up with some excuse to become curious about this, and put in a bit of effort (real or feigned) into examining the situation, and then present it as "I am a well-studied Scorpion, and I have reason to believe that you are incorrect - though that is no fault of yours"... well, that would take some sincerity and some courtier and some etiquette to pull off without offending people, and the plan would require a rather lot of refinements, but it's the sort of thing that could very well work.

If he's being accused because someone wishes to gain advantage out of it things become difficult, but if he's being accused because this is some magistrate's best guess as to the situation, it's much more manageable - especially if we can manage to get them to change their mind without forcing them to be in the wrong. At the very least, we can hear the accusations against them, and our testimony is likely to be taken as at least pertinent.

Mind you, if he's Kolat, it's entirely possible that the accusation is *true*. Figuring out what to do about that will be a bit tricky. Figuring out what to do if Pale Oak is Kolat (and/or has gotten caught for being Kolat) will be trickier.