What are the high-level goals of this vote again? Are you trying to gain her trust, are you trying to figure out what her goals are so we can figure out a counter-offer, are you just trying to figure out why she's ganking grief spreaders?
[] She's being obstructive because she thinks we can't offer her anything and this trip will be a waste unless she can goad us into a fight so she can take our soul. Convince her otherwise.
[] You have much more to offer than just moving grief around. Privacy sphere. Or, you think you could have her back home in approximately an hour. The few things you can't do you have teammates for.
[] Ask her what it is she values so much, and what the problem is back home.
The first thing that needs to be done is that we need to directly disagree with that. The second thing that needs to be done is that we need to directly communicate to her that we know damn well where her problem is and still believe we can help with it, because she appears to be assuming
that we will not be willing to travel to Scotland with her. When, on the contrary, we are totally capable of & willing to do that, just not by @#*)(!!$ twelve-hour commercial air.
She thinks that she no longer has anything to gain here. And until she stops believing that, nothing we say will be treated in any manner except dismissively. Therefore, we must address that immediately.
Now just go ahead and remove everything in your vote that describes her antagonistically: "obstructive" "goad us into a fight" yadda yadda yadda,
it's all pointless and serves no purpose except to impair Sabrina's ability to perform diplomacy.
When we know what her motives are,
which we will only gain by not treating her as an enemy,
at that time we can decide whether we want to kill her or not. Before then, we have to avoid this stuff.
[X] Be as direct as possible.
-[X] Begin by countering her earlier assertion that we "can't help her at all." True Grief Manipulation is extremely flexible, and most of what we aren't capable of we have people for, or we expect to become capable of in the near-to-mid term.
--[X] Given what she's told us, and given her presence here, it's pretty clear that there is a problem involving something she values above most else back home.
--[X] If it takes a trip by hypersonic grief aircraft with timestop to fulfill your end of a bargain, so be it.
[X] Cut to voting fairly quickly.
I'd rather avoid specifying
anything about what we can do. It's enough to simply say that we're capable of more, and then to hypothesize her problem's location back in Scotland. Her reaction to us saying that we can help her and asserting that we know that she has a problem back in Scotland should be sufficient to put things on the straight-and-narrow afterwards, hence why my vote is so short. If her reaction is "neener neener no you can't help me,"
then we can get into specifics of why we can't help her because she'll have
confirmed that there is a problem. If her reaction is to push back on the problem, we'll have more-or-less confirmation that there
is a problem and that she needs help. If her reaction is to attack us, we gem her. Etcetera.
Overplaying our hand here by putting specific stuff on the table is pointless, achieves little, and risks much, just as going on another story about how we want to make the world a better place would: we are only in a position to make educated
guesses about what specific things we have that she might find useful, beyond the offer of limitless magic that we've already put in front of her and pulled back in the form of the clear seed, and guessing wrong would be... a poor action. We need do nothing but change the subject to her problem in Scotland after asserting that we're capable of more than she thinks we are, and then let her fill in all the blanks we're currently missing: why precisely she thinks we can't help, what precisely her problem is...
Almost everything I laid out in the previous essay is, while strong and I feel probably highly correct, still a guess. It's essentially clear that there is something important back in Scotland and that she's here for a reason, while she's outright said she thinks we can't help her. It's my feeling that by addressing those more-or-less fully confirmed points, we can drag a bunch more information out of her.
So, what this vote looks like is:
[] Be direct (avoid going off on stories or beating around the bush because it hasn't worked with her)
[] Do the following
without provoking her, in fact,
while explicitly de-provoking her because she's pretty fucking provoked right now. Also, avoid having her outright dismiss the following attempts, which is a real risk as-is, because she could easily respond to "why can't I help you" with "well y'don't trust me and i don't trust you, also you're an idiot and a judgemental moralist."
-[] Try to get information from her regarding why we can't help her
-[] Try to get information from her regarding Scotland
--[] Overall, try to get information from her regarding what we might be able to offer her that she would value more highly than the clear seed.
[] Cut to voting instead of starting some argument when she inevitably throws an outburst at us again.
So why did I phrase it like this?
[X] Be as direct as possible.
-[X] Begin by countering her earlier assertion that we "can't help her at all." We can help her: we are capable of much beyond moving grief around, and most of what we aren't capable of we have people for, or we expect to become capable of in the near-to-mid term.
--[X] Given what she's told us, and given her presence here, it's pretty clear that there is a problem involving something she values above most else back home.
[X] Cut to voting fairly quickly.
Stating that we
can help her prevents the surrounding stuff from coming off as any sort of threat, as talking about how great your capabilities are is wont to be. If she wants to counter the statement, then if she wants her counter to be strong she'll have to point to some specific capability she believes us to lack, which would give us a ton of information and a big opening because between us and our allies, there really
aren't capabilities we lack, just ones we haven't developed. Otherwise, any weaker counter would allow us to proceed with the next line, after which she'll be in a position where virtually anything she does will give us more information: any reaction to the assertion that something important is in Scotland, any reaction to our ability to help with that something, even
getting cagey would be informative.
And then, well, we don't have particularly reliable information on what other things to ask or assert as of the moment. So... cut.
)
