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Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

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Just chiming in that I'm aware of plans other then de-escalate, but I still like it a lot more then the others.
 
Re: OPSEC

I just started reading this fanfiction, and this paragraph really stood out in its relevancy.

Some Ninja said:
The most important skill for any ninja to possess is the ability to remain hidden: Your foes cannot fight you if they do not know you exist, nor uncover your secrets if they are not aware of them. The Enemy has mastered this skill, and you must do the same. Your opponent will have spies and pawns even within the walls of Konoha, so you must not reveal any secrets you uncover without thinking twice and then twice again, or it will not just be you but those you care for who pay the price for your mistake.
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-The Need to Become Stronger, Ch6.

RIP OPSEC.
 
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[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate ALTERED
It's @Briefvoice's plan only with changes (at the bottom).

Objectives:
1. Survive
2. Deescalate the situation to where there's no imminent threat of violence
3. Apologize and explain yourself
4. Express flat-out disgust about "legitimately" killing to protect your secrets

  • If it seems like Minami is about to unleash violence, seek Akane's verbal support in urging Minami to hold off and talk just a little longer.
  • Let Noburi/Keiko/Akane(?) take the lead with speaking.
    • They don't trust us RN and honestly they're better at Diplomacy than us.
    • Use the below as potential discussion points, both for them and for us.
      • We're writing this plan as though we're (Hazou's) talking to them. Change voice as appropriate.
    • We can talk but don't lead.
    • If they have sudden foot-in-mouth syndrome, talk for them.
  • Explain yourself to Minami
    • Promise her that you're going to address Kagome's actions, but you want her to understand where this team came from too.
    • Ask Noburi and Keiko, if it's okay if you could tell Minami the story of how we became missing nin. She needs to understand who we are.
    • Unless the others protested, tell Minami the story of the Village Hidden in the Swamp and how it came to be and how it ended. If the others didn't want to reveal too much, tell the story but in more vague terms that would make it difficult to identify it as the swamp village.
    • Explain you didn't set out to become missing-nin... it was more done to you, and all of a sudden you were in a situation where there didn't seem like there were other options.
    • But objectively now you've got to tell her honestly... Mist (or "our home village" if being vague) is a horrible place and Leaf seems a lot nicer. In case she wondered if it was all propaganda, it's not.
    • Kagome's story is his own to tell... enough of revealing comrades' secrets. But you can tell Minami that when you found him he was lost and alone after a long exile in the woods, and if he owed some penalty for leaving his home village, you think he's paid it.
    • Kagome was living on his own for literally years, justifiably afraid of everyone with only complete paranoia keeping him alive. It doesn't excuse his actions, but you're hoping it helps Minami understand.
    • You want to believe in the ideals of the Village Hidden in the Leaf and the Will of Fire. It seems like a beautiful thing, even if humans are always bound to fall short.
  • Final thoughts with Minami.
    • If she needs it to feel safe in our company, Hazou will be her hostage.
    • But weird as it is to say after all this, he would rather be her comrade
  • Time to talk about Kagome's actions
    • Get mad.
    • Kagome, enough of this "stinkers" shit. That's the word he always uses when it's time to stop treating someone like a human being and you're sick of it.
    • Kagome calls Minami a 'dumbbutt' so he don't have to feel bad about what he tried to do. Well it was attempted murder and it was wrong.
    • Everyone on this team has done things that are wrong because we thought it was that or die. Okay. We're all ninjas, all killers, all terrible.
    • But this wasn't 'do or die'. This was trying to murder a fellow member of our new village because you thought there might be some danger from something she knew under hypothetical circumstances far in the future.
    • Fuck that. And you know what, fuck the idea that it's "legitimate" for a clan to kill an innocent bystander who did nothing wrong to protect its secrets.
  • Let everyone digest and respond
    • If Minami brings up the 'Stone Cold Killer' thing, feed it into the 'we had absolutely no idea what we were doing as missing nin' narrative you've been talking about. No one on the team understood anything about diplomatic neutral zones. Literally some guy in a bar hired you to steal a message, and when you tried 'suddenly jounin' and from then on you were just trying to stay alive.
    • If Minami expresses outrage about the idea of continuing without some summary punishment of Kagome, plead with her to think of him as someone who is sick, a ninja conditioned to immediate violent response to any threat after too long in constant danger. Promise her that we will deal with this further we get safely back to Leaf.
  • If possible, resume the mission.
Changes:
  • Noburi and Keiko are taking the lead with talking.
  • Reordered discussion with Kagome (it is now after talking with Minami).
  • Removed the threat of exile with Kagome.
  • Removed the discussion about our fuckup. Save it for the next update.
 
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[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate ALTERED

I'm uncertain as to whether or not I want to unvote the original DED at the moment.
 
Dissonance said:
RIP OPSEC.
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I think part of our problem is that when there is any real disagreement about what to do next, especially if it results in significantly different plans (although it still occurs somewhat with minor edits), the plans are at least partially optimized along a dimension that does not matter to plan efficacy. That is, we tend to tailor plans to get votes and support amongst ourselves, and this is not the same as writing plans optimized solely for IC actions.

faflec said:
Manami
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Mipselling in the first bullet point.
 
faflec said:
Let Noburi/Keiko/Akane(?) take the lead with speaking.
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Not a fan of surrendering Hazou's influence here, mainly because Minami just reacted angrily at everyone because Keiko/Noburi/Akane seem to let Kagome off the hook here. In fact the only one who hasn't said a lot is Hazou, giving him the best shot at talking her down. We should definitely have them help us here though. Also I think somebody else then Hazou should restrain Kagome (Akane?) so that Hazou can speak easy here, or maybe we should even disarm Kagome for now.

The goal here should afterall be that Minami understands that we aren't going to let this just slide but also want her to calm down and give us time to work/talk this out. And that she doesn't kill us.

faflec said:
We can talk but don't lead.
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Maybe that is just me personally, but the other three didn't really manage in succeeding to calm Minami down, they seem to have pissed her off even more, and pre-retcon they put all the blame on Hazou, doesn't make me confident in them handling this well without input.

I feel like the order is weird, we aren't putting enough emphasis at actually stopping Minami.

1) Ask/beg/plead with Minami to give him time to sort this out, he didn't save her live so she could just kill him/them
2) Address Kagome like in the Plan
3) Apologize to Minami
4) Then the whole explanation

[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain, deescalate ALTERED
 
@ContextBot I recognize your concerns but argue that it is tactically better for us to let Noburi and Keiko to lead, specifically because they are better at Diplomacy (the skill). Additionally, I would argue that Minami's anger was a response to Akane's statements; Noburi and Keiko seemed to limit themselves to factual "this is what's going on".
 
[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain,deescalate ALTERED

@faflec would start by pointing out how badly this plays out for Minami. What with 5 other ninjas who will gang up on her. That even if she stays alive she would have to become a missing nin
 
Oneiros43 said:
[X] Action Plan: Deescalate, explain,deescalate ALTERED

@faflec would start by pointing out how badly this plays out for Minami. What with 5 other ninjas who will gang up on her. That even if she stays alive she would have to become a missing nin
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I do not think telling her "if you escalate we will kill you" helps our situation. Like, at all.

Let Keiko do the factual analysis, if Hazou (the former leader of the team) introduces killing Minami to the situation she's going to think we're threatening it (otherwise, why introduce it at all?) and flip.

Also, she's not stupid enough to not realize this. Her internal monologue when she realized we were the Cold Stone Killers confirms she realizes that we can kill her if we have to.
 
Oneiros43 said:
start by pointing out how badly this plays out for Minami. What with 5 other ninjas who will gang up on her. That even if she stays alive she would have to become a missing nin
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I don't think this is right either.

My model of Keiko's model of Minami has her aware of being outnumbered by a group with very strong cohesion. Keiko would model that Minami is aware that she would have a significant chance of dying if she chose to fight. If Minami didn't die, then she would be aware of the consequences of that too.

Minami feels trapped. Minami didn't want to be dragged into another clans secrets. Minami is going to have a breakdown.

---

I would like to note that I wrote that in flow and not with "therefore, Minami is going to have a breakdown" as my starting assumption. I had no idea I was going to arrive at that conclusion until I typed it out.
 
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Dissonance said:
I would like to note that I wrote that in flow and not with "therefore, Minami is going to have a breakdown" as my starting assumption. I had no idea I was going to arrive at that conclusion until I typed it out.
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That's...actually pretty good. It'll be pretty much the same thing as the pre-retcon chapter minus the issues of Minami actually dying.
 
@faflec, We should probably tell/remind her that the ultimate decision about Kagome is in Jiraiya's hands and that he will be informed, she probably isn't thinking about the pangolin-toad connection at the moment. And that we could wait until he responds about what to do about Kagome.
 
ContextBot said:
@faflec, We should probably tell/remind her that the ultimate decision about Kagome is in Jiraiya's hands and that he will be informed, she probably isn't thinking about the pangolin-toad connection at the moment. And that we could wait until he responds about what to do about Kagome.
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No, this forces Jiraiya to a) kill Kagome and fuck his political power; or b) cover things up, and kill Minami to shut her up. And also weakening his political power.

I mean, what do you think's gonna happen when we show up again and Minami tells the Hokage of the murder attempt in front of him alongside the ANBU that are gonna be within earshot of the Hokage 24/7?
 
Hello everyone. I have not been super active the last... week? Two weeks? for various mental health reasons. I am doing my best to stay caught up on the thread now. You are all awesome <3
 
faflec said:
I do not think telling her "if you escalate we will kill you" helps our situation. Like, at all.

Let Keiko do the factual analysis, if Hazou (the former leader of the team) introduces killing Minami to the situation she's going to think we're threatening it (otherwise, why introduce it at all?) and flip.

Also, she's not stupid enough to not realize this. Her internal monologue when she realized we were the Cold Stone Killers confirms she realizes that we can kill her if we have to.
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I think it might be better to say something along the lines of "We're all high up in the air on a wooden platform, everyone here has lots of explosives, and you have an AOE kill field with most or all of us in it. If this comes to violence, it'll go poorly for literally everyone. Your anger is justified, but I don't want anyone here to get hurt, let alone die, so let's all calm ourselves down and talk about this peacefully." That doesn't sound so much like a threat as a statement of "if this comes to violence everyone is fucked".
 
Enjou said:
I think it might be better to say something along the lines of "We're all high up in the air on a wooden platform, everyone here has lots of explosives, and you have an AOE kill field with most or all of us in it. If this comes to violence, it'll go poorly for literally everyone. Your anger is justified, but I don't want anyone here to get hurt, let alone die, so let's all calm ourselves down and talk about this peacefully." That doesn't sound so much like a threat as a statement of "if this comes to violence everyone is fucked".
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I don't think this is necessary: Minami's shown RN that she doesn't really care about us (save maybe Hazou/Akane), and arguing that if violence occurs everyone dies isn't going to do any more than arguing that if violence occurs she dies. And she knows that.
 
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