[X] Action Plan: Negotiating as Men
My concerns:
1. How does this plan respond to Orochimaru arguing that Hazou should accept the bioseals even if it kills him, because the Akatsuki's victory would be that much worse than Hazou's death? If we don't have
some grounding for arguing that accepting a higher chance of losing the world to the Akatsuki is better than letting Orochimaru end up the sole runecrafter, I see one of two ways this plays out:
- Orochimaru treats Hazou's demands as a bluff, refuses to entertain them, and poses us an ultimatum: either we accept the bioseals, or he refuses to provide us substrate and expects us to blink first. Two can play the arbitrary-demand game.
- Orochimaru takes Hazou's demands seriously, and re-interprets Hazou as a total hypocrite who'd let the world burn just to save his own hide, with all his talk of "Uplift" being empty words. He may or may not bend to our demands afterwards, but Hazou would completely lose any respect Orochimaru had for him.
I. e., as-is this is guaranteed to destroy our current relationship, and perhaps sabotage the entire Rift Assault plan (due to, basically, two overly volatile personalities clashing and ending up pathologically unable to cooperate). We need some justification for why Hazou's death at Oro's hands is worse-by-our-values than a 50% (or whatever percentage) higher chance of the Akatsuki's total victory. Else he just won't take this seriously.
Like, our position is just
genuinely incoherent otherwise.
2. We need to get the rest of Team Uplift outside Oro's grasp before we initiate these negotiations. I think it's plausible that he scouted out our location using minions/Summons/??? biosealing abilities, and that his response to our demands would be to capture everyone, then use a combination of threats and mind-control tools (potentially extremely limited, but see what he did to Ren) to make Hazou print runes and Noburi redistribute chakra.
If the rest of the team gets away, however, Oro's definitely denied at least Noburi, which means he has to go nab another Wakahisa, which greatly increases the chance the Akatsuki are forewarned (see Oro's speculations that they seized control over the chakra-redistribution bloodlines worldwide).
Also, Mari being outside his grasp is the only way our dead man's switches work (and it's plausible that he infers/guesses that our mysterious dead man's switch is bound up in one of our teammates).
3.
Tone:
- Respectful but firm. Negotiating as men.
- Motivated by rational self-preservation: not unthinking fear or morality.
The aim of the corresponding section in my plan is to strike a very specific tone: where we view Orochimaru not as a potentially hostile person with whom we need to engage in posturing, but as an agent with values orthogonal to our own. The aim of that framing/posture is to dissolve any attempts at a status game, which the framing of "negotiating as men do" necessarily involves. It's an invitation to treat each other as
systems which neutrally pursue different goals, such that getting mad at each other is as coherent at getting mad at gravity for making water flow downhill.
I think that framing would go over better. For one, it should nullify any potential posturing about honour that Orochimaru may attempt. If we're volitionless systems, the only way to make each other do what we want is to change the objective circumstances of our situation. You don't make two streams merge into one by yelling at them; you do it by digging.
4.
We've enacted deadman switches but would prefer a more collaborative approach.
I'd prefer phrasing it as "we
can enact dead man's switches", not "we have already done so". Considerably less aggressive, IMO. And ties in better with my preceding point about the tone. If there are no other options, he would
want us to enact the dead man's switches so that we can coordinate, and getting his buy-in before enacting them signals our good faith much better (whereas going into the meeting with the dead man's switches already active signals adversarialness).
