We are, it occurs to me, like somebody entering an Energy crisis with cheap and clean fusion... who then wants to give it away.
No wonder the other meguca are suspicious.
They are seeing things as a market .
We as an disaster.
Nobody is going to ask disaster relief why they are giving away things for free.
Everybody is doing so in a normal market economy.
Y'know, a few days ago when somebody in the thread was talking about the DeBeers diamond monopoly, I was going to jokingly suggest that we put them out of business by flooding the market with artificial diamonds to drive the value down...
And now I realize that's essentially what our existence is going to do to the Grief Seed market. As Akiko kept telling us before we rendered her catatonic, they're a valuable commodity. If we're giving away Clear Seeds (each being essentially 37,000 Grief Seeds), then the value of Grief Seeds is going to drop.
Not worthless, mind you, because Grief Seeds are still a valuable resource. We can't make a Clear Seed without a Grief Seed to start from. And as our operations expand, they're going to become a hell of a lot rarer, because girls won't be witching out, so production of new Grief Seeds will eventually grind to a halt, but most of them probably don't know that because they don't know where witches come from. But in the short term, their value for barter is going to
plummet. No wonder the established meguca hierarchy is freaked out by the idea.
Maybe we could just offer only one-time Grief cleansing (Gems and Seeds), then call after a week or so and see how that went?
An alternate thought: we're essentially giving away a valuable resource
and source of combat power to all comers. Tokyo might be reluctant to accept it now. But when they find out that Ishinomaki and Sendai have accepted Clear Seeds and gained all the advantages that represents? They'll be desperate to get some of their own to maintain the balance of power. Nobody wants to be the only meguca group without a Clear Seed.
