Can someone please recap me on A-Day and why it sucks?
On the presumption that the Akatsuki are themselves working on necromancy and will, if left to their own devices, eventually complete it and resurrect Nagato, we can assume that Nagato will be resurrected unless we have a way to stop Akatsuki from doing necromancy.
On the presumption that stopping Akatsuki from doing necromancy is prohibitively difficult (because you'd have to kill them or something and they're too powerful for that), the question becomes how to ensure "Nagato gets resurrected" isn't a lose-condition for the setting.
Ami's solution to this is for us to find Nagato first, and resurrect him ourselves. By doing so, we aim to put him in a life-debt towards Hazou, which we will use to ensure Nagato's rise to power complements Uplift instead of contradicting it. Ideally this part isn't too difficult, because Hazou and Nagato are likely to find each other kindred spirits and something akin to Hazou's Uplift may even be Nagato's plans regardless if he doesn't have the means to pull off a second ritual. The life-debt thing just makes it more likely that when Nagato comes back he chooses something like Uplift instead of something like mass brainwashing.
In practice, following a strategy like this is most likely going to involve us searching for
everyone of value we can find in the Pure Lands. There's no sorting algorithm here, we're just as likely to find Akane first, or Jiraiya or even Hashirama or something. If we find someone like Jiraiya first, we can adjust our plans on the fly to take advantage of any opportunities that emerge. Ami believes that someone like Nagato will be easier to find than your random schmuck because with his famed charisma he'll be at the center of whatever Pure Lands civilizations he finds himself in, meaning we just need to find one of those (presuming, of course, that they exist, but it's hard to imagine why they wouldn't) and ask around until we get a lead. This is still compatible with a more expansive search net, though.
I think this plan, or rather this overall approach to necromancy, is our best shot overall (as opposed to speccing hard into rift-moving sealtech or open-new-rifts sealtech, neither of which we know is actually possible at our current skill level). It requires us be fast, so as to beat Akatsuki to the punch, and sneaky so as to avoid the fail-state of "Akatsuki captures Hazou and takes over the necromancy project", but with good execution it's got a shot, which is more than I can say about any alternatives that I've seen.
Naming scheme was a nice throwback.
