There's also an in-story explanation for why precog works less well now than it used to earlier, but no-one has guessed at it yet, IIRC.
I'll take that as an invitation to bloviate beyond any actual capacity for rational analysis.
Assuming we're still in the Amala Multiverse depicted in the previous quest (or at least something more-or-less shaped like it), I have... let's say three ideas.
THREE! THREE IDEAS! AHAHAHAHA!
The Conception, in the previous quest, changed the fundamental structure of the world
0. It shouldn't be surprising that precognition wouldn't work under the new regime in the same way as the old. That hasn't happened
yet, but it's happening soon, and precognition definitionally interfaces with the future. One can imagine that precognition might fail completely at the point of the Conception, only growing more precise with increased (temporal) distance from it. (More likely, for ludic reasons, it'll level to a nonzero accuracy rate post-Conception; it'll just be increasingly inaccurate the farther in the future it tries to look — like a straight-line extrapolation of a significantly curved manifold, to draw an analogy that possibly isn't an analogy at all.)
Alternatively, precognition as it's practiced by our protagonist (and perhaps her parents' peers) is more of an algorithm that relies on an external oracle
1 for
K-physics
2 than any sort of inversion of causality. If so, then if
K-physics isn't the primary physics in play, the oracle's output is no longer accurate. Now, you might think "but isn't sorcery, including psionics, a manifestation of
m-physics already?" Well, yes, but it's one Kagutsuchi grudgingly allows and has longstanding mechanisms for handling and, in particular, shutting down when they get out of hand... except that's maybe not true anymore, isn't it? We just had a rift open up in the middle of our classroom doing a decent impression of Baby's First False Vacuum Collapse
3, and apparently it only got shut down due to human
4 intervention, and Hotsuin did imply that
something had to have been scraping away at the fabric of reality as we know it in order for a traumatized middle-schooler and her psionic unwilling-rival classmate to have cracked it open.
Finally, it's possible that there's an Essence user active in the universe
right now. I'm not sure a Sidereal could pull off most of what they do without the Loom of Fate; but if they've figured out how to sub Kagutsuchi in for it, they'd almost certainly be enough to throw off predictions, given how hostile Creation's metaphysics are (were?) to that sort of thing. (...I think. It's been more than a few years since I interacted with
Exalted — not since SoaBS v1, really.)
0 Well, what most of its human residents perceived as the fundamental structure of the world, anyway.
1 In the complexity-theory sense, and not necessarily the mythological sense.
2 To borrow a term from the previous thread. Even though I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who ever used it.
3 This is not a Schild's Ladder reference, although perhaps it should have been.
4 For at least the purposes of this sentence, Amu counts as human.
The impossibility of writing a quest with questor-dispatchable precog, or absolute 100% accurate future vision, is the out-of-story explanation for it.
It might require the questors to buy into the idea, but I think it's feasible, in theory.
C°ntinuum managed to be a whole TTRPG with a similar premise.
Looks like the Dumpty Key really doesn't boost Utau's skills by a whole level, otherwise she would've gotten an extra dot on Ragged Crossroads and it would've been 5 dice rolled rather than 4.
Well, not generally, at least. Ragged Crossroads is
EDGE and
WINTER, while the Dumpty Key is obviously a
KNOCK tool.
Makoto may be modelled loosely off of Junko, but she very specifically isn't an expy, so that wasn't a thing anyway.
I confess I had to reread her bio to realize she wasn't, instead, an expy of a certain other
tomboyish and athletic electromaster by that name.
