Stop, full stop. We're being idiots.
Well, yes. We should be asking followup questions. Lots of them. This was literally the first sentence from what was intended to be a full on investigation, with a lot of questions and answers and back and forth.
What we should be doing is less asking her what she was looking for and instead start asking specific questions. Such as "What were you thinking when you said Homura and I could change destiny?" Or "Can you draw the Feathers that were obscuring your vision for comparison?" Or "What do you remember about the attack on Sayaka?" And most importantly, "Where were you when you saw yourself dying?"
We should also ask Oriko if her powers just inherently gave information in cryptic form or if that's something she had to add in after the fact. Because that sentance was supposedly Oriko remembering something and communicating that information to herself.
In general, most of the focus on any of Oriko's visions should center around the period she saw herself dead and see if we can draw conclusions about what she was doing in the time immediately before, what the circumstances might have been, what might have provoked Feathers or given Feathers more license to act against her, that sort of thing.
We should also be parallelizing some of this. Umika should be able to make more than one book. We should be able to have Mami, Kirika, Sabrina, and Oriko write a narrative of the suspicious Feathers related events like the Barrier incidents to see if those narratives line up between Mami and Sabrina and Oriko and Kirika to see if we can draw conclusions about how Feathers' reality warping works.
Also, see if the invisitext shows up if we try to write the memory of a scene where we know it showed up in during the story.
While we're doing this, see if Umika can Heaven's Door the feather from the Barrier experiment to extract information about it. Also, ask Oriko to check the karmic connections for the feather with her new powers. If it's a mundane feather, at least she should be able to trace its karmic connections back to the bird it came from.
I think the resistance Oriko is encountering is interesting. Umika is indicating that's not normal, suggesting that it may not just be Oriko losing access to those memories due to her powers shifting, but might be enemy action. We know Homufer was capable of messing with memories, and she is high up on our suspect list for Feathers for a reason.
Maybe, Oriko's visions were never actually being obscured, but she was having her memory of those visions modified. And now Oriko is pushing past those memory blocks and getting at information she didn't have access to when she had her precog due to the memory blocks.
It's also important to consider the possibility that Feathers was trying to kill Oriko specifically to deny us access to the information from her visions. That might mean that when her powers changed, she was content to seal her memories and move on, scratching Oriko off the hit list once she was no longer a threat. Oriko wouldn't have been able to see the change to her expected destiny, since by that point she would have lost her precog powers. Depending on what we find out, we might want to consider seeing how Oriko feels about Umika adding her own memory blocks to keep her from being targeted. Something that could be released while we are together in a privacy bubble while we contiue to analyze and investigate, then reapplied before she leaves.
Wait, that is pretty important. We also should ask ourselves what we were doing before we appeared in that alley.
We should definitely do this. Maybe also see if we can't remember why we were dying. Our presence is one of the key anomolies and apparently wards off Feathers to some degree.
