You misread that re-read. There were further fisticuffs that Xia Lin's arrival put a stop to. Nothing says she hit anyone.
Here's Jin Tae's exact words:
There is nothing here to indicate that Xia Lin stopped further violence with more violence. It wouldn't make sense for the White Sky guards to not draw Steel if Xia Lin counterpunched the White Sky Soldier, and we'd definitely hear about anyone who got punched by Xia Lin being in the White Sky Infirmary by now if she did.
This seems to make it very clear that Xia Lin didn't engage in violence.
There his been enough "things will get way worse with the MoI if ling qi isn't careful" already written into the narrative that it absolutely would've been perfectly justified in the narrative if we'd pick them. People just straight up don't want to.
In terms of mechanistic progression of the narrative? Not really. The framing of prior decision points have been pretty weak in supporting the pro-MoI options. That is, they were weak in presenting them as pro MoI choices. The logic wasn't really present/available to the reader/player in the moment, and landing on those options probably would have been awkward.
That's already covered by various assholes already involved. I suppose the party leader could be being assigned to useless busywork to stop him from noticing some specific bit of corruption he was going to purge before he got the assignment... Or he could have just gotten a wild hair up his ass about our project and assigned himself to it. But MiniInt as a whole had no business here until the Jungle stuck her vines in.
Honestly, that strikes me as irrelevant considering both sides need an interpreter to know what the other side is saying. However, body language and tone should be enough for anyone to surmise what the Imperial Artisan was trying to say.
Oh, wait, I did forget that they still needed translators. Why weren't the translators doing their job then?
Busy elsewhere mediating another part of the construction probably. Translators are a specialized job and there's a limited number of them. They'll most likely be attached to the supervisors instead of patrolling the site.
Ling Qi cultivates Music, and communication comes easily to her. Everyone else is working with regular eidetic memory and not everyone is willing to spend a few weeks cramming a language instead of their actual interests.
Entiry workforce? No.
The thing is we're not managing things carefully. If we were, for at least one instance, we'd toss them a bone to keep them satisfied--some small things that doesn't actually matter. We've had several opportunities to do this but chose to do the opposite instead, even when it would've cost us nothing. All these little moments are going to add up and its likely going to come back to bite us because we didn't manage carefully, diplomatically which is our job. This is most likely if we keep doing what we've been doing, showing ourselves to be openly biased rather than maintaining a veneer of unbiased professionalism.
