hexarchate_rpg | should we help or hinder the assassination of Jedao?

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moves: chapter 2

should we help or hinder the assassination of Jedao?

[In the current move, Flute has just informed the team that they are to accompany a group of Lanterner assassins to a conference where the Lanterners will attempt to assassinate Jedao. This post is for reactions and plans, both in and out of character.]

Sasha's quiet as the group heads from the Catastrophe Axe back to the Cantata. She wants to have a cup of tea and spend a few hours working her way further into the Axe's grid, but work comes before play, and figuring out how to handle Flute's instructions will be a fuck of a lot of work.

Once everyone's safely on the Cantata and the lock has closed behind them, she starts issuing orders. "Grid, please ask Sulen to meet me in my office in twenty minutes, and inform everyone there will be a team meeting in the common room in one hour. Reshad, I'll want you in the meeting with Sulen."

She pulls her memory stick out of her pocket and gives it to Alaric. "Find Aymad, stick this in the minigrid--not in the main one--and see what you can find out about the watchers in Flute's system in the next hour."

Then she turns to Seyli. "I know you want to yell. Go ahead and do it. You've got twenty minutes." [These are heptarchate minutes, so it's more like ten minutes in our calendar.]

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Sulen meets the away team outside the lock. "I made tea in the common room," they say. "I tried to make coffee but it was more complicated than it looked. Is everyone uninjured?"

"Nobody's injured." Reshad, having dropped the airheaded act she'd assumed for Flute's benefit as soon as she was relatively certain of being away from bugs, seems quieter than normal, thoughtful.

"Thank you for the tea." She bows acceptance of the meeting, and heads for a cup to clear her whirling mind.

[So Reshad, being a big nerd about the Historical Figure Shuos Jedao, is absolutely going to argue for subverting the assassination mission and kidn- she means, attempting to ally with - the General. Who better to tear down the h*archate than the Immolation Fox?]

"Fuck, yes, I would love some tea. Thank you." Sasha's grateful to Sulen, and beginning to wonder how Ashari gets by without them. With much excitement, presumably.

"We learned a lot, and I will fill you in very soon, but first Seyli and I need to debrief. Seyli, where are we doing this? My office?"

Seyli had remained silent and brooding in the encounter with Flute and the entire way back. They never dropped their guard, but it was clear they were displeased.

"Excuse me?" Their eyebrow raises as they look at Sasha and they forget to tack Sir onto that comment. They've lost their cool a lot in the past, but they were never as stupid to take it out on their commanding officer (not that was an option for most of their career). Seyli doesn't think much of Sasha at this point, but she's certainly weird, as far as commanding officers go.

"I not going to yell and certainly not at you if I was. Sir." They're bristling now, shaken out of that shocked tension.

"We can have a quiet conversation over tea, then. In my office."

Sasha leads the way, with a brief pause to acquire tea and jam. She observes the formalities, sitting neatly behind her desk and gesturing to Seyli to close the door and take a seat of their own. "Triage. What concerns you most, about that meeting?"

Sasha summarizes the meeting with Flute for Sulen's benefit, noting that Flute seemed both highly competent and frustrated with Personnel's decisions.

She concludes, "I think we're going to have to thrash out how to handle Flute's assignment with the entire team. But I wanted your input first. And I wanted to ask you, Sulen, specifically--we have an emergency line to Ashari. Do we notify them of developments now, or do we wait? The message itself will be secure--we exchanged keys before we left--but it has to go through rebellion channels to reach the time they're in, so attempting communication is a security risk."

Sasha calls the meeting to order and explains Flute's orders. "We suspect that the mission to assassinate Jedao is in Quill's interest, not in the interest of the rebellion as a whole. However, we must bear in mind that Flute's commitment to the rebellion may be genuine. What factors do we need to consider? And what do you think our actions should be?"

[I'm looking for both in-character and out-of-character feedback; for what it's worth, in character Sasha thinks the case for assassinating Jedao is pretty good, but out of character, I think kidnapping him seems like more fun, if we can pull it off.

vass,

slybrarian,

mafyyil, and

pengwern, I would very much like to hear your OOC thoughts on possible directions, as well as your characters' thoughts.

Flute wanted some of the team to travel with the Lanterners and provide training. That means potentially splitting the party. I'm interested in people's thoughts on this as well: do you want your character to be assigned to the Lanterner ship, or to the Cantata? Or would you rather elide the entire question and pick up with the next move at our next destination?]

Sulen winces. "I'd advise against contacting them unless in a true emergency. They sometimes... overreact." Particularly to things happening at an insurmountable distance, and particularly, they have to admit, when Sulen themself is involved. They close their eyes briefly, remembering a certain dramatic incident, and then open them again. "Did Ashari discuss with you how much autonomy they meant us to have?"

Wherever Ashari is right now, it's undoubtedly dangerous, and Sulen doesn't want them distracted.

"Thank you. They intended us to have a great deal of autonomy." The person in charge has the furthest to fall. "I can set up a fail-safe so that this information is delivered to them, should we find ourselves unable to do so directly."

"I've accessed all the information we have on this Shuos Jedao, and it certainly seems like his assassination is a worthy goal, although it wouldn't have been my priority."

[Sulen would rather assassinate key Vidona policymakers, but they've guessed the rebellion would rather destroy the heptarchate than reform it and aren't sure what to do about that. They're constitutionally incapable of arguing a position that they don't believe so can't pretend they don't think getting rid of Jedao is the moral decision.]

[OOC, I definitely want to kidnap him, although I'm not sure we're capable of it- but having him turn the tables on us also sounds fun! I'm okay with splitting the party although I'm not sure what we'd be doing on the Cantata while the trainers were interacting with the Lanterners.]

"He does seem an strange choice," Alaric agrees. "I can see how in the short term his death would benefit the Laterners and hurt the heptarchate, but in the long run doesn't his big murder-suicide do a lot of damage to heptarchates forces anyways? Not even that long-run, really. Medium-term at best. Was the war really close to tipping the other way at this point?"

[Trying to capture Jedao seems fun and tricky, and trying to kill him also seems tricky. We did accidentally kidnap-slash-subvert one official, though!]

"The problem, as I see it," Sasha says, "is that we don't know who made the choice. Ashari thought that Quill designed the mission. If Quill's working with the Shuos who sent Mishka, she might very well have chosen to assassinate Jedao on the grounds that this will help the heptarchate somehow, in the long run."

[Capturing Jedao without tipping off the rest of the rebellion that we did so seems like the really hard part!]

Alaric nods. "Or maybe it would benefit a specific faction, either in the heptarchate sense of the word, or a faction of the rebellion. Kill Jedao so that there's a big loss among the Kel now, and maybe in whatever post-heptarchate order they're trying to engineer they'll come out on top."

[oops Alaric beat me to replying; reposting here.]

Virmad is — possibly visibly; certainly visibly to Sulen — struggling to balance his personal feelings on this matter against his professional — ? when did he start thinking of himself as a professional rebel? — assessment of the situation as a member of the Rebellion.

“To address Alaric’s question,” Virmad interjects, “if the Heptarchate can be defeated, or at least held at bay, by a small client state — which, given the distance any additional forces would have to travel to get here if Jedao and his swarm are removed as factors, seems like a plausible outcome of an assassination — that could both leave it open to external challenges and exacerbate the internal contradictions that let heresies spread in the first place.” The part of him that still thinks like a magistrate is pleased with the phrase “internal contradictions”, borrowed from some borderline heretical Liozh political economist he read years ago.

“On a pragmatic note,” he continues, “I’m not sure I’m convinced that sending multiple assassins is more likely to succeed in the first place than one was. Granted, the Lanterners may not be the only assassins operating at this conference, although they’ll probably be the only ones targeting Jedao, but still — more assassins, especially more assassins with the same target, means more chances of drawing his attention. It’s also possible, as we discussed earlier” — he nods to Sasha — “that this is precisely Quill’s intention. Jedao won the war, if you can call it ‘winning’, while recovering from the effects of a botched shattergun assassination attempt. If they can draw his attention to the assassins and prevent that damage, who knows what he might accomplish while clear-minded? It was always speculated that his actions at Hellspin might have been connected with the aftereffects of the assassination attempt, although there was never any conclusive evidence either way, at least not in public. Even if Quill does want us to succeed, it may be a tactic to galvanize the Heptarchate into committing more forces to this conflict, which while logistically challenging wouldn’t be strictly impossible, and, depending on the aggressiveness of the response, might simply mean an even more efficient and total genocide of the Lanterners. I hope I speak for all of us when I say I wouldn’t want to see that.”

He stops for a moment to breathe and weigh his words before continuing.

“Shuos Jedao” — his heart is pounding in spite of himself — “is dangerous, no doubt. But he’s also an unknown and variable quantity, as my speculations about the implications of his death may have illustrated. I would say it’s between ‘difficult’ and ‘impossible’ to predict the political and calendrical implications of what we’re being asked to do. This assassination plan seems...” He searches for the right word. “...Ill-advised, especially when we don’t trust Quill’s motivations. But doing nothing will attract attention we don’t want from our ‘superiors’ and their other agents here. I wish we had a better sense of Jedao himself, beyond the historical record.” He gestures a little helplessly. “If there were a third way...”

[sorry for this WALL of text and also sorry for being so bad at posting! Virmad has a lot of thoughts and feelings and most of them are that he REALLY doesn't want them to kill Jedao (he wants to meet him, ideally!) but also doesn't want to totally compromise his position in Sasha and Sulen's eyes, so he doesn't feel that he can advocate strongly for anything other than "wait and observe" at the moment, unless someone else suggests something first.

for my part, out of character, I don't trust Quill, but the theory I REALLY WANT to believe is precisely that Hellspin is connected with the shattergun aftereffects, so Quill wants the assassination attempt to fail so that Jedao will still be alive and active when the Liozh heresy begins and can throw his support behind the Liozh. I'd be extremely down for a kidnapping. my biggest goal for this mission, I would say, is to have Virmad and Jedao meet in some capacity.

also yes I did mean to vaguely imply that there's a Liozh political economist who's halfway to inventing Marxism.]

Sulen narrows their eyes. "Why would Quill wish for a more aggressive campaign against the Lanterners? Do we suspect them of being an agent of the Heptarchate? Or are we merely remaining open to the possibility?"

"I had simply assumed someone wished to deprive the Heptarchate of this general's apparently legendary strategic abilities for the next..." They check their notes. "Four hundred years. "

This isn't Kel and this isn't mercenary work, and they remind themselves as they follow Sasha into the office that they have to expect things to be unusual. Should be happy that things are unusual. Seyli is not happy.

"What doesn't concern me? We're getting tangled up in a mission that involves someone who never lost a fight, without any significant backup, or clear support?" They give Sasha an incredulous look. "Sir, I fail to understand how you can ask that question with the information before us." They remain standing, hands folded behind their back in a casual parade rest.

[[In character I think we are working on how Seyli feels about this all. They'd vote kill over kidnapping, though. Out of character, kidnapping sounds hilarious. As for splitting the party, Seyli almost has to go to the Lanterners to provide training, as they are the only hitter on the team?]]

[If splitting the party sounds dreary/unfun to RP, we can totes fast-forward the journey and take up again on the other end, at the conference. So that's definitely an option.]

"Which is why," Ione interrupts carefully, because she is all for the gentle intrusion into the planning discussion instead of talking over anyone, and she's still nervous around people she doesn't know very well and please no one resent her for her opinion, good thing the only empath in the room is her, "I think we should just borrow him instead. We would be removing him, but then we could find out why, or maybe why he thought they specifically wanted him dead instead of ..." She's lost the hold of the sentence, but still focused on the point.

"I mean. Could we just. Pretend to kill him? And instead keep him for ourselves, at least until we think we actually need to kill him? I could certainly do fake lethal injection," a little wavy-wiggly hand gesture, "And actually have it be temporarily-arrests-life injection instead. Poison dart that isn't actually fatal sort of thing?"

[I like the kidnapping idea, but Ione is also in favor of kidnapping over assassinating because her training definitely tells her that if someone else wants to kill a guy, she wants to talk to the guy first! So for once my character and I agree.]

Mafyyil has finally figured out how to look something up, and read a short summary of Shuos Jedao's biography. She's rather confused about Quill's intentions, but also about the fact that no one has told her about any suspicions concerning Quill before the meeting.

"Can't we, like, talk to the guy?", Mafyyil suggests. "We want to damage the heptarchate. Apparently, so does he, and he's good at it, too." (This in a rather admiring tone of voice: reading about Hellspin Fortress has impressed her.)

Thank the Prophet, they're talking. "Sit the fuck down, Seyli. You're hurting my neck."

Sasha's going to need Seyli's input as she starts making plans, which means she needs them thinking, which means she needs to reassure them somehow, which is going to be an interesting exercise, since they aren't exactly stupid. "Strictly speaking, we are the backup. I know you'd prefer a few more moths and a lot more heavy ordnance. But I believe you have not registered that Alaric and Ione and Aymad and I could kill everyone on this station, given a couple hours' lead time. Three, if their firewalls are really good. Humans are fucking fragile and very dependent on specific levels of oxygen."

"Sulen, we know that Quill is working with the Shuos agents who sent Mishka. Whether that makes her a heptarchate agent, rather than a faction of her own, is anybody's guess."

Sasha looks at Ione. "I like the idea of not doing what Quill wants, but I don't see an easy way for us to extract a body, dead or otherwise. There's station personnel, Flute's people, the Lanterners, and the Kel, and I see no reason that any of those interest groups would let us retain a corpse."

Reshad has been quiet, thinking, listening. She takes this as her chance to speak. Her mind is in a whirl, without question. Of course it had to be him. Of course this was the pivot point.

"If Quill wanted to make things less stable in the future, she could do worse than to remove Hexarch Mikodez.

"That - and Jedao's legendary mind - incline me to think we want him. Will we succeed on our own? I wouldn't be here I'd I didn't think we have a real chance. But if he could be persuaded to see the monstrosity the Hexarchate becomes..." She slants a shoulder in a delicate shrug.

"As far as getting him out without Flute's knowledge... That may be easier than you think. We botch the mission, and botch it badly. Disrupt their comms, break their plans, and execute our own. No, I'm more worried about the Kel."

[What do you mean, callous? Heh.

Reshad can be persuaded the other way, but she's very interested in kidnapping Jedao instead of killing him. It just hurts to throw away a weapon that good.

OOC I'm a big Jedao fan, but it's nice not to have to try too hard to justify it IC. ;) ]

Edited 2019-01-19 03:51 (UTC)

"But Jedao's a monstrosity himself, isn't he? He's about to murder his own army. I can see that he would be a valuable bargaining chip. But that's a massive risk for an uncertain payout." Sasha doesn't understand the urge to see Jedao as a potential idealist. There's no way he could be trusted, not with that record. Or future record.

[Psst, maybe repost to this thread? I'm not sure people saw Mafyyil's contribution to the debate...]

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should we help or hinder the assassination of Jedao?

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