PSA: There will be a retcon concerning Cannai. Things will improve but not be perfect.
Background:
Cannai was angry because you preempted his role as Alpha when you unilaterally went behind his back to find diplomats to go to Pangolin without talking to him. He is the head of the Dog Clan, international relations are his job, it could endanger the clan for untrained people to be mixing into that arena, and violating pack hierarchy like that is Not Okay. For reference, this is almost the exact same thing as when you sent a letter to Itachi without talking to the Hokage first.
Related entities, for clarity:
- The Conclave is the meeting of (representatives of the) Clan Bosses from the eastern nations with whom Leaf has contracts. This includes the Pangolin, Monkey, Toad, etc clans.
- It is happening at an embassy in Pangolin territory.
- The Crusade is a separate thing – it's effectively NATO for the Clans, an agreement where the Bosses are going to go fight the Dragons and everyone pinky-promises that no member clan will attack any other member clan while the Bosses are away, and that if anyone does then everyone else with attack the offender. This is a proposal that Hazō made and is (as far as he knows) still being discussed in the Conclave.
Details:
In chapter 483 the plan had Hazō approach Cantelope and Cantilever about traveling to Pangolin territory and take up residence at the embassy so that Hazō could reverse summon there in order to participate in future Zoo Rush engagements. I thought this was fresh ground with no antecedents, hence Cannai's reaction. It was then pointed out that no, actually, there is a lot of related action in the past, but most of it was offscreen and nothing was direct enough that it would come to mind. Among other things:
- You have told Cannai that the Conclave was happening.
- You have asked him about what's going on at the Conclave, somehow not realizing that there was not a Dog representative there because it's hundreds or thousands of miles away, across two enemy territories, and on the other side of a mountain.
- We wrote an OOC post in which we said that 'No one you talked to was even remotely willing to entertain the idea.' This pretty much put paid to the idea that this conversation was a green-field operation as opposed to be one of many.
In addition to all of the above, this voting cycle was unusual in that the players wanted to engage with two separate points in the timeline: A continuation of the flashback to the conversation with Ami that ended on a cliffhanger in 482, and also continue the current-day plan from last time. I prefer not to write Ami because I'm not good at it, but
@Velorien stepped up and volunteered to write that scene, so we said that it was okay to post a plan for the Ami conversation and also link to a separate plan, either new or the old one. This change meant that if you weren't reading the discussion in order to see that announcement and you didn't read the plan closely then it might be easy to miss the fact that there was more going on than the Ami conversation. (There was some more to it, but those are the critical parts.)
Given the historical context and the potential issues of the unprecedented linked plan structure, we have decided to do a retcon. It will be up in the next day or so, but the basic sequence of history is now assumed to be this:
- At some point in the past, at least a couple months ago, Hazō spoke to Cannai about sending a diplomat to Pangolin.
- Cannai responded with some variation of "Dogs are pack animals who live close to the land. Traveling such a distance and living among strangers would not only be dangerous but would be miserably lonely. I would never order anyone to do anything so cruel."
- In Cannai's mind this meant "He proposed it, I said no. It's done." In Hazō's mind it meant "He said that he wouldn't order it, but if I found someone who wanted to do it then he might reconsider." Adopting a "better to get forgiveness than permission" approach, he went ahead and started asking around.
- The dogs he talked to (a) thought the idea was bonkers and universally turned him down and (b) assumed that he must have already gotten Cannai's permission to ask something so nuts, so they didn't go running straight to the Alpha about it.
- This continued for a period of weeks. Somewhere during that time, Hazō mentioned what he was doing during family dinner. Mari instantly said "This seems fraught. Have you explicitly gotten Cannai's permission? He clearly isn't actively behind the idea since otherwise he would be doing the asking himself. That means he's either neutral or opposed. If he's opposed and you continue then he's going to be pissed that you're preempting his authority. If he's neutral and you bring him an inappropriate candidate then you may annoy him. Unless you know what he would consider an appropriate candidate, you should talk to him about it."
- Hazō may or may not have protested her objection, but he did finally go to Cannai.
- Cannai was angry at Hazō for doing this but recognized that it was partially based on miscommunication and no actual harm had come from it. He laid down the law in no uncertain terms and made clear that since Hazō now knew what was what, doing something like this again would mean losing his position as Summoner.
- As punishment, Hazō is going to have to spend significant time (exact hours per day TBD but a non-negligible number) patrolling the border with Hyena. It's a boring, unpleasant, nearly pointless job since the border is long, dusty, and things are pretty quiet between Dog and Hyena right now. This punishment will continue until Cannai is satisfied and Hazō should expect it to last a few weeks at least.
