Puella Magi Imperatrix Mundi, or: Wherein Half Of Japan Tries To Kill You

[Nevill]

It's worth noting that Maiko seemed to think that Konno wanted a deal that would benefit both groups. In this case, I think she's trying to politely get rid of Chizuka in a way that doesn't cause their group to disintegrate.

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I don't think they can afford to 'get rid' of Chizuka while simultaneously being under pressure from their neighbours. It's more like she wants to guilt trip us into feeding her group by using Chizuka as someone we sympathize with.

If that was all there was to it, we may still want to take this offer, if only as a temporary mercenary help to hunt down the Witches we ourselves can't kill in time. However, there is another aspect to it.

It's not clear what effect this will have on the rest of her group, though. Will it forestall the group's splintering, or speed it up?

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What she does completely undermines Furuhata's position as a leader. Honoka can't object to the decision that benefits the group, so she will have to accept whatever terms Konno negotiated. It just means that the powers of a decision-maker shift to Konno, who both gets to establish herself as crucial to the group's survival and also receives our implicit backing - especially since Furuhata is bad at diplomacy and is unwilling to involve us.

If you are with Konno - you get an ally who will keep you fed and safe (since that's what we promised at the meeting*, and I think her magic can let her see we meant it). If you are with Honoka, you get isolationism and Oshigiri. It's pretty clear what an already cornered group would prefer.

It's a sort of a soft coup that we probably don't want to be a part of... unless we have a reason to believe they would fare better under a different leader. Which they still might? Maiko mentioned that neither of them is overly malicious, so it might be Konno genuinely believes that Honoka's leadership is inadequate and she would do a better job. Maiko said as much.

We can hardly decide how to sever this Gordian Knot without devling deeper into their internal politics/relationships... which we might not have a lot of time for. Given the circumstances, though, her proposal doesn't sound too bad for us... if we ignore its possible effects on their group.

Edit:
* The exact wording was:

"If you have a problem with me or someone from my town let me know and we can try to resolve things peacefully, otherwise if you keep to yourselves I'll return the favor, schedule permitting I am always happy to talk and thrilled to help, if you're in trouble let me know and maybe we can work something out, aaaand if you want to set up a more formal arrangement later that's also cool," you rattle off quickly.

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[Camellia]

Killing her, or approving of having a subordinate kill her, would have tanked our Tomo social link though. Also, I really like Yui's line about how she doesn't want to kill someone because it's convenient.

 

[Redshirt Army]

hard men making hard decisions while hard

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Yes, yes, you're very badass. Yui isn't okay with killing people, and that isn't something worthy of contempt.

If she kills, it should be because she's absolutely forced by circumstance, not out of convenience, and it's something we as voters should forestall as much as possible without costing other lives.

 

[Nevill]

Eh, that's regurgitating the ten-pages argument from a year and a half ago. Which, incidentally, lost. If I recall correctly, we have committed to attempt to solve the problem, and that was that. No point second guessing it now.

As for our current dilemma... I would look into ways of stabilizing their situation, because taking them in with all of their internal problems would solve nothing, and splitting them up might do more harm than good - but Furuhata's reticence makes it difficult indeed.

If the same agreement Konno is trying for were reached on Furuhata's authority, it might help keep things roughly the same, but that might not be good enough given the way things got.

 

[Redshirt Army]

You want to be a hero who will save everyone, who will never be forced to compromise on that goal, who will never falter or break under the strain... and that means you need to be strong enough to see it through.

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It shouldn't need to be pointed out, but to be clear: "I had to kill her, I wasn't strong enough to protect others any other way", goes directly against Yui's intent when making her wish. If we make a habit of going down that line of thinking with our actions, we will reject our wish and lose our magic.

 

[groon_the_walker]

Why do we even want to hold territory in the first place? To provide safety and order for a magical girl population. Anyone who hunts in our territory obeys our rules and doesn't start any fights outside the territory, and we get called in on any edge-cases. Any taxation rules should be systematic and fair. Our government doesn't acknowledge outside sovereignty over those in our territory. She can send in girls and they can be granted residence, but if they decide to stop sending back grief seeds to this outside group, the outside group is out of luck. We make no agreements calling for grief seeds inside our territory to be exported, not even in exchange for tithes. Why accept that bargain when we could just wait for a new full citizen to claim the same territory?

 

[DarkLight140]

Okay, back to this. (Note later: I'm posting this now, I have done WAY too much writing and not yet hit my conclusions but I want it in-thread.)

What we want to have happen here, in abstract and general terms, is to increase our (group's) available power and security while doing no harm to others. I think we're all on the same page on this, but I'm bringing it up because it's worth keeping in mind our root motivation and relating potential courses of action to it when considering their worth. Further, we need to solidify what specifically we're negotiating for before we come up with negotiation tactics.

Our usual objective in pursuit of our motivation is to acquire more magical girls. This isn't the only way we go about it, but it's the relevant one here. With (significant) caveats regarding the results of interpersonal interaction, more girls means more power and more power means more security. Konno is on the surface fulfilling this objective, but I think we all immediately see that her proposal is riddled with flaws which undermine this objective's achievement.

To examine them:

Having girls in our territory who do not ultimately owe their allegiance to us undermines our status as sole legitimate authority. In political terms, we would be giving up our monopoly on force by having a foreign military group present on our soil. No ruler who possesses it should ever give up their monopoly on force casually.

Assigning a specific territory to such girls without claiming authority over them calls into question our authority over that territory at all; after all, if there are girls occupying it who don't have to listen to us, in what sense is it ours? The only sense is that they pay us taxes and military service, which is to say, we'd basically be a feudal overlord with them as a vassal. Recall that we're trying to centralize control here and get away from patchwork splinter groups, at least within the Nagamioka borders- this works directly against that. Further, vassals historically rebel with startling frequency.

Being seen to do either of the above by the girls on our border at large encourages them to think whether it would be possible for them to get a slice of our territory. Sure, sure, we're tough and dangerous... but we're also giving up our authority and lands in exchange for not very much, aren't we? That means that they, too, can push us a bit and get us to give up authority and lands to them in exchange for not very much. The appearance of weakness- whether or not we are actually weak- attracts predators. We can't afford to fight off predators often, not yet.

Having a group beholden to another political entity in our territory means that we are subject to that group's politics. Whether it's an internal argument or an external invasion, we would need to track not only others' relationship with us, but also others' relationship with the Nerima group, because if something goes wrong with the Nerima group then the members of that group in our territory might go running off, declare themselves independent, get attacked by enemies (on OUR territory) looking to do a full wipe of the group, or even try to defect to us. While this isn't catastrophic, we can barely keep track of our own internal politics and haven't kept track of our own external politics properly (there are long stretches of our border where we have no idea who lives on the other side). We will run facefirst into any Nerima group problems that spill over onto us, never seeing them coming, because we don't have the numbers, time, and expertise to track and prevent their problems on top of our own.


Part of the reason that all of these issues trend toward "you can't trust these loaned people" or "you need more people and are thus weak" is because this offer has been made with the explicit assumption that the latter point is true to such an extent that we can't afford to care about the former. Remember that Konno offered this after saying "If your claims of controlling Nagamioka as a whole are to be taken seriously, you are catastrophically overextended" and we agreed. That is, we told her that we cannot hold all of Nagamioka on our own. That's what "catastrophically overextended" means; "unless we pull back or get reinforcements we will suffer catastrophe". That set ourselves up to negotiate from a position of hilarious weakness, because Konno is working from the understanding that the thing she's offering- manpower- is something that we cannot turn down or we will likely die.

From her perspective, then, this offer is mutually beneficial because we're giving up a lot of authority and prestige but in exchange she's probably saving the life of one or more members of our group, possibly all of them, by reinforcing our soap-bubble borders by effectively shrinking them in a way that makes us lose less face and resources than if we lost the territory outright. We're not giving up much at all, because what she's asking for is territory that we're about to lose anyway- effectively, the net cost to us is zero. These are the kinds of circumstances in which people actually are willing to accept loss of monopoly on force and so forth, outlined above. We've bitten off more than we can chew and she's bailing us out to mutual profit.

This is not our perspective, because we believe that we can hold those borders- they're somewhat porous, but we have multiple girls with detection powers, some serious bruisers, and enough veterans to keep us from terrible mistakes, so while people can enter and move through unopposed they can't stay here without us finding them and kicking them out. Further, we're anticipating- and receiving- a steady stream of new recruits both via immigration and contract. However, we have perpetuated her misunderstanding and so her offer is shitty because she's misunderstood our actual position.

If we want her to accept a better offer, we must clarify this point or we're basically talking past each other. Right now, Konno has no motivation to give us a deal as good as we'll want (which will involve getting actual girls loyal to us, possibly friendship, etc., the usual) because she thinks she's bailing us out of a critical situation and we have no reason to give her a deal as good as she'll want because we're looking at her and going "why the hell would I give you so much for so little".


Next post: Trying to analyze those girls, who we want and why, and how they could potentially be arranged optimally.

 

[Subjective]

What Konno appears to want here is, as implied by Maiko and mentioned again by people here is to obtain loyalty from as many of her group as possible and split, unfortunately, she wants to do this in an underhanded backstabish way. However, she has been mentioned to be primarily motivated by self-interest and wanting an honest deal that will benefit everyone.

The majority of the group we're dealing with here is primarily dissatisfied with Furuhata's leadership style/delegation to Oshigiri, the only exception being Tsurumi Ninomiya who has major issues with Chizuka in particular.

Therefore, I propose a diplomatic outreach offering directly to recruit all magical girls in the group, bypassing Konno's more indirect takeover and forcibly intervening. Or maybe even just proposing such a thing to Konno to see how she reacts to a diplomatic takeover. Sweeten the offer by implying a senior leadership position for Konno.

The good news for the attempted integration of a messy meguca group into our own is that I don't think every member will accept. Primarily, Fukuhata has been mentioned to be super wary about outsider intervention and as having a tendency to stonewall rather than continue a discussion. Also, Oshigiri "platonic yandere" thing and large amount of loyalty will likely shackle her to Fukuhata's decision. Leaving us with five, who with careful placement look to be easily integrated, depending on how much personal investment they have in remaining in their current territory. This is pretty much aimed at the new contracts, but given the hellscape that is Toyko they may have already cut ties to their normal lives by necessity.

Individually speaking, Akina Tamazaki appears to dislike teamwork and prefers to operate solo, which our style of leadership and large, currently unoccupied, territory should enable easily. Chizuke is loyal but a bad judge of character, so if necessary she can be separated from her previous group and integrated with either our core group or partnered with Yumi or assisting Fuuka's group. Tsurumi Ninomiya needs to be valued for her own abilities and moved away from Chizuke, easily done with our large array of powers that hers can potentially compliment, potentially her item duplication would be useful with Yumi and her Skirt of Holding also it might stop Yumi robbing ATM's if she can just duplicate money. Miyu would benefit from an actually stable environment which we can easily provide. And if we offer Konno a senior position, potentially working with our information team, and more reasonable leadership with potentially defacto control of whatever teammates that are best left together (Akina and Miyu?) we should be able to entice her to agree to present our offer to her rapidly fracturing group. We just need to convince her that our diplomatic take over is a better option than her coup and that we have the ability to manage her groups issues in the long term. Also mention the ways we benefit from this, being honest about this being an exchange (territory, leadership and grief seeds for larger membership and useful magical powers.) is likely to appeal to her desire to see a mutually beneficial outcome.

Edit: @DarkLight140's analysis is super amazing and completely blows my first one sentence guess out of the water, they're spot on about why we shouldn't accept Konno's deal as stands and our issues with external diplomacy at the moment.

 

[FelOnyx]

If we want her to accept a better offer, we must clarify this point or we're basically talking past each other. Right now, Konno has no motivation to give us a deal as good as we'll want (which will involve getting actual girls loyal to us, possibly friendship, etc., the usual) because she thinks she's bailing us out of a critical situation and we have no reason to give her a deal as good as she'll want because we're looking at her and going "why the hell would I give you so much for so little".

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It'll be hard to say "hold up, we didn't mean to imply we were in as bad a negotiating position as we did" without seeming like we gave away the truth and are now trying to take it back, but I'm sure the social types can figure something out. I agree in general.

it might stop Yumi robbing ATM's if she can just duplicate money.

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What kind of thief prints money? There's no honor in that.

 

[Subjective]

What kind of thief prints money? There's no honor in that.

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It's the long con, with so many duplicate bills in circulation eventually the bank will be forced to print new, shinier, less 'copyable' notes. Then, as dictated by narrative logic all these notes will be stored in the same place prior to distribution, which is exactly when Yumi will strike!

 

[DarkLight140]

So, now that we've gone over the immediate question of "why did that just happen", let's turn to the question of "what do we want"?

Well, obviously, Yui wants magical girls. That's what Yui always wants. But which magical girls does Yui want most?

I have run low on innuendo, so let's take a look at what we know about them and see if we can answer that question, which will then lead us to the question of "knowing what we do about what is happening and why, how do we make what we want to have happen actually happen?" That one's tricky though and I'm not covering it this post.

Girl	Magic	Weapon	Friendship	Animosity	Experience	Notes
Honoka Furuhata	Magic radar km+	Bombs/mortars	Oshigiri	-	Veteran	Team lead, well-meaning but bad at it
Ikue Oshigiri	Conceptual bullshit	Sword of bullshit	Furuhata	Everyone else	Veteran	Flawed and disliked, but Furuhara doesn't see it
Shina Konno	Weak point detection	Twin swords	-	Furuhata	Veteran+	History of backstabbery
Tsurumi Ninomiya	Object duplication	Duplicated objects	-	Chizuka	New	Bitter about Chizuka being stronger
Chizuka Kumoto	Magneto	Also Magneto	Everyone?	-	New	Manipulated into starting this
Akina Tamazaki	Set scry/teleport beacons	Magic longbow	-	Furuhata, Many external	Veteran	Proud, competent, soloist, sees people as tools
Miyu Ishida	Item enchantment	Magic multitool	Furuhata?	Everyone/angry	Extra New	Long-term value

@Echo's posts were nice and all, but they weren't a chart. Charts are nice. I've covered this in-thread before.

So, it should be readily apparent that unlike Kaede's group, this team doesn't have fault lines- it has a solid core, built out of Furuhara and Oshigiri, who are loyal to one another and have between the two of them everything they need to effectively watch each others' backs and to fight and win against witches and magical girls alike. Nothing else here is solid; every girl is on her own with no reliable friends. Instead, they're held together by practicality and mutual benefit. This means that we can probably pick and choose who we want to poach, but it also means that the team cohesion they do have is likely to shatter into tiny bits if subjected to serious stress.

Furuhata and Oshigiri should be addressed together, as the only pair with mutual loyalty. It's perhaps a rash play, but I think they're actually a really attractive prospect. Furuhata is a veteran who genuinely tries to keep everyone safe and do the right thing by her people- while having been living in Tokyo for, presumably, her entire period as a magical girl. That bespeaks a moral core which has weathered the shit she's seen gone down, because even if she is a shit leader she keeps trying. We need people who try, and someone like that is likely to find Yui's idealism appealing instead of laughable. And we don't need Furuhata to be a leader because we have other leaders, plus veterans whose experience trumps hers to keep her from insisting on taking charge. Plus, holy crap that wish magic has synergy with Minami's. Oshigiri is more of a problem, since she's been exploiting newbies... but they're a package deal. Aside from that, if we don't have her in a position of leadership she won't have authority to abuse, and she sounds like a nasty bruiser who could do a lot to make our group's overall combat prowess improve. We only have sparse information on why she's disliked but I suspect it's for all the usual reasons that bitter Tokyo veterans are hateful and awful people, which is something that we have accepted before- we can live with it as long as they're willing to go along with our ways of doing things.

Konno would be fantastic to have around- IF we could trust her, and we know we can't. Finding weaknesses of witches could reduce magic use and casualties while her prowess as a diplomat/socialite would be valuable as well, but it's simply not worth the risk of keeping her around when we won't be able to bring her onto the idealism train and in the medium to long term she's poison to any group that she's not genuinely loyal to.

Ninomiya has a cool power- and we have a lot of people playing with enchantment and cool stuff, so it would do well here- but if she's bitter about
one person being stronger than her, she probably wouldn't respond well to the general level of overpowered bullshit we're throwing around either. We want newbies, but we don't need a morale case and Chizuka is a higher priority in my opinion.

Chizuka we almost certainly want because she's got power attached to a person who likes and is loyal to others but can be manipulated- a great package for someone loyal to Yui in the future, and probably not so tough to turn if we can just get her onto our side in the first place.

Tamazaki has cool powers but not so cool as to overcome her personality. Prideful because she's good we could maybe work with, but seeing people as tools? That goes against our philosophy entirely and we have more than enough enemies without adding hers to the list.

Ishida is a new contractee and upset about everything. That's fair, we have new contractees who are upset about everything too. That's not much to go on, but we could probably take her and have it work out okay, although it would eat up a bunch of actions. Her power is cool but not essential since we already have two enchanters on our roster. Her stated long-term value to other groups means that Konno will probably want to retain her in whatever group Konno ends up in, so that she can personally reap the benefits, which is likely to make snagging her difficult.


Basically what I'm saying here is that in our ideal situation I think we want to get the group's leadership core and Chizuka on top, plus Ishida if we can get her, and the rest of them should splinter/defect elsewhere/hold tight/wander off and die in a way that we're not responsible for/look I don't really care here. This means that we pick up zero new members with animosity for one another, get some neat powers and synergy, Konno gets what she wants because she'll be removed from her current disliked subordinate position, and hopefully we'll turn both a newbie and a veteran to the Idealism Side while they drag a huge badass along with them.

Comments, other opinions, and thoughts on how to make that happen without outright telling Kanno that she should launch a coup would be most appreciated.

 

[Noumero]

@DarkLight140's analysis is excellent, but I think there's another point to be made: the sheer potential utility of Kanno's wish magic.

• It should work on such things as "plans", "team compositions", and "patrol routes": it's an excellent tool for strategy, tactics, and analysis.
• It should work on friends as well: even if Kanno must perceive what she is analysing as a threat for her wish magic to work, making it activate should be as easy as imagining herself and her friend as playing a competitive game.
• As a consequence, she would be able to help with planning, building defense perimeters, and so on.
• Combination of her wish magic with Maiko's is deadly: Kanno is limited by information about her targets that she is aware of, which is usually not that much; with Maiko's grimoire, it's a lot.

As such, I think that she is the single most valuable member of her team. In the environment of our coming Empire, she would thrive, since optimizing large-scale systems is what she could do better than anyone else.
The easiest way to get access to her magic is to negotiate for exactly that: simply add five hours of her time per week to whatever deal we end up agreeing on. But of course, that leaves the problem of trust: while she could see our vulnerabilities and help us fix them, she could also see them, pretend to fix them, then sell us off to the next invading group. Even if we negotiate for her to be loaned into our territory, that would only marginally diminish this problem.

Therefore, I think the optimal end result is bringing her into our inner circle of allies: putting her into such a position that helping us maintain our rule is more beneficial than massively betraying us. Fortunately, I think it wouldn't be very hard: as with Yumi, cuteness and mass destruction are very helpful.

• She is a rational self-interested agent: ambitious, and wants safety for herself.
• Safety: Being part of our group would definitely give her more safety than being part of a random Tokyo group, as a) we have enough combat specialists that we wouldn't need to put her in direct fights at all, b) we're idealistic but competent, which ensures that we're unlikely to backstab her ourselves.
• Ambitions: As I mentioned, I think her wish magic would work best with optimizing the structure of our growing empire. She would get to be part of a big entity, bigger than any unorganized magical girl group could ever be, and an important part at that. Granted, she wouldn't be the leader, but, to use an analogy, being a key planner of a government is better than being a leader of a cavemen tribe.

That leaves the problem of convincing her of our competence, and also the problem of her former group: how to split it up, whether to split it up, etc.
Thoughts?

Also, @Echo, would Kanno's magic work on science? That is to say, would she see flaws in theories? Perhaps if she sees failure to come up with a correct theory a threat to her life?

 

[Nervos Belli]

So, now that we've gone over the immediate question of "why did that just happen", let's turn to the question of "what do we want"?

Well, obviously, Yui wants magical girls. That's what Yui always wants. But which magical girls does Yui want most?

I have run low on innuendo, so let's take a look at what we know about them and see if we can answer that question, which will then lead us to the question of "knowing what we do about what is happening and why, how do we make what we want to have happen actually happen?" That one's tricky though and I'm not covering it this post.

Girl	Magic	Weapon	Friendship	Animosity	Experience	Notes
Honoka Furuhata	Magic radar km+	Bombs/mortars	Oshigiri	-	Veteran	Team lead, well-meaning but bad at it
Ikue Oshigiri	Conceptual bullshit	Sword of bullshit	Furuhata	Everyone else	Veteran	Flawed and disliked, but Furuhara doesn't see it
Shina Konno	Weak point detection	Twin swords	-	Furuhata	Veteran+	History of backstabbery
Tsurumi Ninomiya	Object duplication	Duplicated objects	-	Chizuka	New	Bitter about Chizuka being stronger
Chizuka Kumoto	Magneto	Also Magneto	Everyone?	-	New	Manipulated into starting this
Akina Tamazaki	Set scry/teleport beacons	Magic longbow	-	Furuhata, Many external	Veteran	Proud, competent, soloist, sees people as tools
Miyu Ishida	Item enchantment	Magic multitool	Furuhata?	Everyone/angry	Extra New	Long-term value

@Echo's posts were nice and all, but they weren't a chart. Charts are nice. I've covered this in-thread before.

So, it should be readily apparent that unlike Kaede's group, this team doesn't have fault lines- it has a solid core, built out of Furuhara and Oshigiri, who are loyal to one another and have between the two of them everything they need to effectively watch each others' backs and to fight and win against witches and magical girls alike. Nothing else here is solid; every girl is on her own with no reliable friends. Instead, they're held together by practicality and mutual benefit. This means that we can probably pick and choose who we want to poach, but it also means that the team cohesion they do have is likely to shatter into tiny bits if subjected to serious stress.

Furuhata and Oshigiri should be addressed together, as the only pair with mutual loyalty. It's perhaps a rash play, but I think they're actually a really attractive prospect. Furuhata is a veteran who genuinely tries to keep everyone safe and do the right thing by her people- while having been living in Tokyo for, presumably, her entire period as a magical girl. That bespeaks a moral core which has weathered the shit she's seen gone down, because even if she is a shit leader she keeps trying. We need people who try, and someone like that is likely to find Yui's idealism appealing instead of laughable. And we don't need Furuhata to be a leader because we have other leaders, plus veterans whose experience trumps hers to keep her from insisting on taking charge. Plus, holy crap that wish magic has synergy with Minami's. Oshigiri is more of a problem, since she's been exploiting newbies... but they're a package deal. Aside from that, if we don't have her in a position of leadership she won't have authority to abuse, and she sounds like a nasty bruiser who could do a lot to make our group's overall combat prowess improve. We only have sparse information on why she's disliked but I suspect it's for all the usual reasons that bitter Tokyo veterans are hateful and awful people, which is something that we have accepted before- we can live with it as long as they're willing to go along with our ways of doing things.

Konno would be fantastic to have around- IF we could trust her, and we know we can't. Finding weaknesses of witches could reduce magic use and casualties while her prowess as a diplomat/socialite would be valuable as well, but it's simply not worth the risk of keeping her around when we won't be able to bring her onto the idealism train and in the medium to long term she's poison to any group that she's not genuinely loyal to.

Ninomiya has a cool power- and we have a lot of people playing with enchantment and cool stuff, so it would do well here- but if she's bitter about
one person being stronger than her, she probably wouldn't respond well to the general level of overpowered bullshit we're throwing around either. We want newbies, but we don't need a morale case and Chizuka is a higher priority in my opinion.

Chizuka we almost certainly want because she's got power attached to a person who likes and is loyal to others but can be manipulated- a great package for someone loyal to Yui in the future, and probably not so tough to turn if we can just get her onto our side in the first place.

Tamazaki has cool powers but not so cool as to overcome her personality. Prideful because she's good we could maybe work with, but seeing people as tools? That goes against our philosophy entirely and we have more than enough enemies without adding hers to the list.

Ishida is a new contractee and upset about everything. That's fair, we have new contractees who are upset about everything too. That's not much to go on, but we could probably take her and have it work out okay, although it would eat up a bunch of actions. Her power is cool but not essential since we already have two enchanters on our roster. Her stated long-term value to other groups means that Konno will probably want to retain her in whatever group Konno ends up in, so that she can personally reap the benefits, which is likely to make snagging her difficult.


Basically what I'm saying here is that in our ideal situation I think we want to get the group's leadership core and Chizuka on top, plus Ishida if we can get her, and the rest of them should splinter/defect elsewhere/hold tight/wander off and die in a way that we're not responsible for/look I don't really care here. This means that we pick up zero new members with animosity for one another, get some neat powers and synergy, Konno gets what she wants because she'll be removed from her current disliked subordinate position, and hopefully we'll turn both a newbie and a veteran to the Idealism Side while they drag a huge badass along with them.

Comments, other opinions, and thoughts on how to make that happen without outright telling Kanno that she should launch a coup would be most appreciated.

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Biggest issue I see with this is it requires us to be able to persuade Furuhata and Oshigiri to willingly give up all their power as leaders of the group, which strikes me as fairly unlikely. I also disagree with your assessment of Konno, as while she may not be loyal, she's pragmatic enough that if she realizes just how powerful Yui and her group are the chances of her backstabbing us go way down. Ninomiya's animosity towards Chizuka also doesn't seem like an insurmountable issue, especially if we have them patrol different parts of the city.

Honestly, I disagree with the basic premise of your plan, which seems to be to encourage the breakup of the group and snap up whatever girls we can. That's a bit more ruthless than I'd prefer. I'm thinking something along the lines of get their members to cycle through our empire, and seduce them to our harem to the darkside to our team via superior firepower, then once they've agreed to work for us we can more easily break up any toxic elements in their group. None of them seem like they are fundamentally incompatible with our group from what we've seen, at least, so I'd rather not start picking who lives and dies.

 

[RubberBandMan]

Breaking up the group to feast on the girls inside is fraught with peril. I'd advise against it. But if we could absorb the group (Not sure we can, we don't know any of these girls family situations, or if there's reasons they have to stay in that area) we could break up the group into sub teams, or at the very least give them institutional support to stop it all from being one bad week from witching out.

And while DarkLight is saying we can poach pretty much anyone, we don't know if they'd all be willing to move somewhere else to be part of our glorious empire. We might end up with the entire group throwing in with us, but half of them refuse to move into our boarders. Thus giving us an even larger area to cover without proper MG density, which is a bad move. We don't want more territory, even if it comes with girls who are (barely) holding onto it currently.

 

[Subjective]

big post, helpful table, insightful anyalsis

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A couple of points of disagreement,
While, yeah, Fukuhata's overall demeanor would work well with us if we can get past her outer shell I don't think that's possible with the takeover of the group that is being proposed. Echo said that:

She's has bad experiences with meddling outsiders and is aware that she cannot into social, so she tends to just stonewall everything.

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Which does not make me hopeful at all for any kind of negotiations, whether in her best interest or not. As Oshgiri is very explicitly a package deal there's basically no way to get her on board if Fukuhata won't agree. And I really really really think that she won't.

Additionally, Konno's only 'betrayals' have been towards an ineffective leadership structure, which is annoying but in the meguca business bad leadership can lead to TPK. Considering her noted degree of self-interest her actions are understandable, further, she is also looking to save her teammates from untimely fates even if it is solely to use as leverage for us.
All of that aside, the major benefit to getting Konno on board over potentially Fukuhata is that she is effectively our "in" for the group. As she's been planning a coup of sorts for some time she has likely built relationships with a number of her group and even if Fukuhata refuses to negotiate with us (which I think is likely) we can get the offer in through Konno. This isn't preferable, as it is somewhat akin to assisting her in a betrayal but if Fukuhata stonewalls (which she has a tendency to do) then its preferable to allowing the group to perish over the course of the next week.

Further, I disagree with your assessment of Ninomiya and Tamazaki, although I can absolutely understand the latter. Ninomiya's item duplication would be very effective if paired with the two, potentially three magical item users we have on board (Himari, Maiko and potentially Miya) even if they degrade over time. Plus Yumi's usage of normal inanimate objects. Her bitterness and issues with powers can be dealt with by separating her from Chizuka and putting her in an environment where her own abilities can shine, which we have, being in control of a large city with space to separate them and several magical item users.

Tamazaki does have issues, legitimate ones if left in either a leadership position or in a team environment, however, we don't require direct interaction and intervention with every single one of the (30? 40?) magical girls the city can maintain. Assigning her patrol routes or territory on the outskirts of the city would be useful, calling on her only when teleportation magic would be especially effective, this would enable her recruitment and avoid any of her personal hangups. The only thing I can really see being an issue is that she may attempt behavior involving feeding civilians to familiars, this would, of course, prevent any form of recruitment but is also something that can be first checked if she would be inclined to that behaviour by Maiko or even a recruited Kanno (what would be the weakness in recruiting Tamazaki?).

Overall, I think we can reasonably diplomatically confront the group, either through Fukuhata or through Konno, (Maybe arrange negotiations with Fukuhata but get Konno to bring the rest of the group to hear the deal? Just an idea.) and explain our willingness to lend assistance and barring issues with the current leadership (Fukuhata stonewalling, Oshgiri's support of her.) likely absorb the almost the entire group with minimal issues. We can offer Fukuhata the same deal we did earlier, a place to stay, safety and some hunting territory until they decide if they want to move on or are ready to enlist in service to The Magical Girl Empire of Nagamioka under the beloved leadership of Her Adorableness Empress Yui.

 

[FelOnyx]

Basically what I'm saying here is that in our ideal situation I think we want to get the group's leadership core and Chizuka on top, plus Ishida if we can get her, and the rest of them should splinter/defect elsewhere/hold tight/wander off and die in a way that we're not responsible for/look I don't really care here. This means that we pick up zero new members with animosity for one another, get some neat powers and synergy, Konno gets what she wants because she'll be removed from her current disliked subordinate position, and hopefully we'll turn both a newbie and a veteran to the Idealism Side while they drag a huge badass along with them.

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We've barely met most of these people, so I don't want to dismiss the possibility of working with any of them just yet. Konno is dangerous, but potentially useful enough to justify depending on what we see of her personality in the future. (ie, just how likely is she to backstab us. Little bit? Lot bit?) We should at least try to keep her on decent terms for if we ever need a favor. Tamazaki as well, we only know about in a general sense. "Thinks of people as tools" isn't promising, but can describe a whole spectrum of people from generic jaded meguca to unworkably toxic.

I don't think we should make it a goal from the start to absorb them. It might be a good idea depending on how things progress, but they also have potential value as a friendly buffer state on our border, depending on how hard it is to fix/patch up/hide under the bed their group problems. If we do absorb them, I think it's actually fine to take members with animosity to each other. These guys don't need to stay a cohesive group if they join us, indeed they probably won't want to. That makes it easy enough to assign them to territories on opposite ends of the city. And I think if they don't have to put up with each other all the time, they'll be able to get along well enough to cooperate if we need them to.

 

[Tallamee]

Take a moment and consider the bigger picture here. This is not just about what we want, or even what would be advantageous to us. If we propose a deal that is too favorable to us, the other side is gonna reject it.

Chizuka is one of the heavy offense members of Furuhata's group which is being pressed by its neighbors. Placing Chizuka in our territory will, in addition to reducing Grief Seed burden, also reduce the martial capacity of their group. There are seven total members, and the offer is for 2-3 of them, including one of the combat heavyweights, to come to our territory.

Presumably the other girls coming with Chizuka will be some of the alternate leadership competition or rookies without preffered talents, but that still leaves the territory of Furuhata notably reduced in capability, with enemies close to hand. The girls sent to Nagamioka are going to be well out of position to assist in defense for Furuhata's territory.

With that in mind, and Chizuka as a given, the other transferals must be among those that are seen as less immediately useful by the leader. In this case, I would hazard that Konno or Ninomiya are the other two to get sent out. From Furuhata's perspective these are the ones that would make the most sense. Removing either, or both, of them does not significantly reduce the direct capability in combat as far as Furuhata is aware (due in large part to Konno concealing the full extent of her powers from her allies).

That all noted, I think that we should take the deal, with one change. The arrangement should be a temporary lease of territory with a predetermined end point. For now, I would say no more than two months down the road, and let the deal be renegotiated at that point. We already gave Chou a contract, and this seems to be the sort of situation to roll out another one for. Let's impress them with our organization and attention to detail.

 

[Hestia&theCourt]

...honestly, thinking about it, I feel like the only reason we're even considering making any kind of deal here is because we want Chizuka? But honestly, this seems really shady to me, so I'm not entirely sure we want to willingly get involved in this morass of backstabbing and power plays. Unless Konno actually has some good reason why Chizuka is actually the reason for this meeting at all, she even lied to get us out here. Is it really worth it?

Admittedly, I value the potential utility of powers far less than it appears some of you do, so I guess maybe some of you are also interested in Konno's Thinker abilities, but... really, if she's willing to try to split her current group like this, why would we trust her not to do the same for us the moment she stops liking our management style? Momoko died because someone was convinced to stab her in the back; let's not have history repeat itself, hmm?

Now, if we still want members of the group, I think we can manage it... but not like this. Not by allying ourselves with someone who Maiko has explicitly stated makes a habit of splitting the groups she finds herself in.

Konno is most likely intending to form an agreement with you behind the back of the group's nominal leader--something she has apparently done before, a fact the rest of the team remains unaware of. Her goal is likely either a power play to take control of the group, or to split off with the team members she considers most valuable,"

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[Subjective]

I don't think we should make it a goal from the start to absorb them. It might be a good idea depending on how things progress, but they also have potential value as a friendly buffer state on our border, depending on how hard it is to fix/patch up/hide under the bed their group problems.

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The current assessment is that due to outside pressures from other groups compounding existing problems with leadership and interpersonal stuff that the group will violently explode by the end of the week. If they were a more stable group than absolutely an alliance rather than a takeover would be much less painful, but in the interest of not having most of them die we kinda need to step in more directly.

With that in mind, and Chizuka as a given, the other transferals must be among those that are seen as less immediately useful by the leader. In this case, I would hazard that Konno or Ninomiya are the other two to get sent out. From Furuhata's perspective these are the ones that would make the most sense.

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Furuhata doesn't actually know about the deal yet, this is Konno going behind her back. I think the general idea might be to establish a territory inside our city, wait for the rest of the group to implode due to social issues (or with Konno's direct intervention via wish magic) and accept and refuse entry to former teammates depending on what Konno feels to best for overall survival and then ask to become part of our group.

I feel like the only reason we're even considering making any kind of deal here is because we want Chizuka? But honestly, this seems really shady to me, so I'm not entirely sure we want to willingly get involved in this morass of backstabbing and power plays.

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If we circumvent the deal and propose direct integration we're avoiding the power plays of others by making one of our own that looks to quash all potential internal silliness. Further, Konno has only been known to technically 'betray' the group she is currently in, for the given value of a betrayal consisting of trying to obtain more grief seeds for your struggling group. By providing a less toxic leadership structure and integrating her into a senior position within our group, for instance with our information team, we can step side any issues with betrayal. Konno has come to this meeting looking for an honest deal that will benefit both groups, that shows a certain degree of concern for survival over power and ambition, that kind of pragmatism is easily worked with.

 

[Noumero]

if she's willing to try to split her current group like this, why would we trust her not to do the same for us the moment she stops liking our management style?

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We won't. The key to her loyalty is ensuring that she dislikes our management style less than her likes being part of our group. As long as it's a net benefit for her, she would stay loyal and try her best to keep us living — and for reasons outlined above, I don't think that would be very hard to arrange. If she is an important part of our group, it is more beneficial for her to cooperate with us instead of defecting.
Furthermore, presence of Maiko and Yumi — insightful veteran magical girls — ensures that such betrayal-plots would carry additional risks for her: they would be much harder to conceal.

 

[Nervos Belli]

What if we reframe it as a loan of our territory to them, rather than us letting their girls hunt on our land? That way it fractures their team less as we aren't trying to poach any of their specific members, and Konno can present it as a mutually beneficial arrangement. We don't have the girls to patrol all our territory, they need more territory. Give it a limited timeframe and it's basically kicking the problem down the road a few months, to when we're better established and have had time to ingratiate ourselves with this group and their actual leaders. The one weakness in this plan is that their group might splinter anyways, but I'm not sure what to do about that.

 

[FelOnyx]

Now, if we still want members of the group, I think we can manage it... but not like this. Not by allying ourselves with someone who Maiko has explicitly stated makes a habit of splitting the groups she finds herself in.

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She has a habit of negotiating behind Honoka's back, is how I read that. Not that she's split multiple groups.

The current assessment is that due to outside pressures from other groups compounding existing problems with leadership and interpersonal stuff that the group will violently explode by the end of the week. If they were a more stable group than absolutely an alliance rather than a takeover would be much less painful, but in the interest of not having most of them die we kinda need to step in more directly.

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The group is held together by a mixture of fear, guilt, and emotional codependency. It is true that they're trapped between hostile neighbors and can barely find enough Grief Seeds, but without those two factors I expect they'd be at each other's throats within a week."

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It's the outside factors keeping them from killing each other. Which is, admittedly, only marginally better. I'm not yet sure what we should do with them long term, but it's possible to keep them independent in some form. We obviously do need to do something with them though, I don't think they'd be valuable allies in their current state. Taking on a few problem members for ourselves to ease tensions and/or a negotiated change in leadership that isn't a violent coup may help them out, or we may indeed need to incorporate them directly. I'd be down for directly absorbing their members if they are, but I don't want to tear the group apart by force or trickery if we don't have to.

What if we reframe it as a loan of our territory to them, rather than us letting their girls hunt on our land? That way it fractures their team less as we aren't trying to poach any of their specific members, and Konno can present it as a mutually beneficial arrangement. We don't have the girls to patrol all our territory, they need more territory. Give it a limited timeframe and it's basically kicking the problem down the road a few months, to when we're better established and have had time to ingratiate ourselves with this group and their actual leaders. The one weakness in this plan is that their group might splinter anyways, but I'm not sure what to do about that.

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A loan for 99 years, as is traditional.

 

[Tallamee]

...honestly, thinking about it, I feel like the only reason we're even considering making any kind of deal here is because we want Chizuka? But honestly, this seems really shady to me, so I'm not entirely sure we want to willingly get involved in this morass of backstabbing and power plays. Unless Konno actually has some good reason why Chizuka is actually the reason for this meeting at all, she even lied to get us out here. Is it really worth it?

Admittedly, I value the potential utility of powers far less than it appears some of you do, so I guess maybe some of you are also interested in Konno's Thinker abilities, but... really, if she's willing to try to split her current group like this, why would we trust her not to do the same for us the moment she stops liking our management style? Momoko died because someone was convinced to stab her in the back; let's not have history repeat itself, hmm?

Now, if we still want members of the group, I think we can manage it... but not like this. Not by allying ourselves with someone who Maiko has explicitly stated makes a habit of splitting the groups she finds herself in.

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You make an excellent point. In a broad sense this is a bad idea. Still, isolationism is poor planning long term, and this lot seem to be mostly reasonable. I do not think we should consider recruitment to be one of our objectives here. This is a chance to build reputation and make an ally.

Furuhata doesn't actually know about the deal yet, this is Konno going behind her back. I think the general idea might be to establish a territory inside our city, wait for the rest of the group to implode due to social issues (or with Konno's direct intervention via wish magic) and accept and refuse entry to former teammates depending on what Konno feels to best for overall survival and then ask to become part of our group.

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Furuhata is a good enough leader to veto any plan to send away her all of her most loyal members or heavy combatants. Konno setting up such a territory is precisely why I want to stick a predetermined end date on the deal. If the group implodes or is overrun the territory lease will be a weight hanging over Konno's head, and any negotiations to happen at that point will favor us enough for dictation of whatever terms prove suitable to the situation. And if the situation holds steady, then periodic renewal of a lease will serve as a reminder that it is not really her territory.

 

[No One]

Her bitterness and issues with powers can be dealt with by separating her from Chizuka

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This strategy depends on how much of her issues stem from Chizuka being better than her (i.e. friend who she brought into the Meguca business), and how much is from 'newbie stronger than me, a vet'. If the former, that works. If the latter...her boss is now that to a tea.

Do I think this would be an insurmountable problem? No. But it's stacking issues with integration on top of issues with integration: we're already devoting a lot of social time to getting all of our current members settled (what, 3/4 of the group is new?), as well as a bunch of separate issues taking time.


I think the best approach would probably be to try and build ties slowly with the girls individually and as a group, so then we could (ideally) integrate them properly easier later when (hopefully when we aren't as snowed under and more stable, but I'm not sure that'd happen ).

Edit: Building them as allies probably works too, especially since then if they implode we could integrate them anyway . I'd just be concerned about how strongly we ally with them: that runs very hard into issues with their enemies: if they were actually part of our group, there's likely more of a degree of separation (we could always dump them on the complete other side), as well as a more obvious threat. If we were just allied...do we step in? How easy would it be to step in? Would we just make active enemies with half of Tokyo and end up in the same boat as Momoko, without the hax to back it up?

However, I'm not sure how/if it's feasible to attempt that without running into the issues DarkLight laid out earlier.

The current assessment is that due to outside pressures from other groups compounding existing problems with leadership and interpersonal stuff that the group will violently explode by the end of the week. If they were a more stable group than absolutely an alliance rather than a takeover would be much less painful, but in the interest of not having most of them die we kinda need to step in more directly.

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As FelOnyx points out, they probably aren't in danger of immediately imploding without outside interference. Unfortunately, we'd probably constitute that outside interference, especially if we're going through Konno, who seems to be about half the issue .

 

[Nervos Belli]

My view is that there's nothing fundamentally impossible about us incorporating their whole group peacefully, it just can't be done quickly. So what we need now is to extend a lifeline to Furuhata in a way that doesn't undermine her standing and allows us to start working on building the ties we need to peacefully annex them.