Found: Carbon Deposits

Nobody's seen Carbon for a while. He did not participate in the battle to free Shibuya. He had been busy. How has he been busy? Well it's easy to see when he finally wanders back inside of the Olympus HQ, with a fair sized burlap sack. The black tiger were fang sets the bag on a table, and it tips over, spilling out several Palace Lands markers, the kinds of things their troops have on to help identify them.

He has been out scouting, and has clearly taken out several patrols around Mac Anu, without going too deep inside. Don't want to get to the point where they can trigger the guardians. He takes a seat at the table and pulls his hood down. He needs to get himself something to eat. And try to write up a report on the Palace Lands defenses around Mac Anu. It's not going to be easy to crack that nut, not even counting the Guardians.

With the Palace Landers evacuating Shibuya, that leaves them to concentrate their forces in Mac Anu, which will indeed make that a tough fight, the Guardians aside. The Guardians will certainly sway the battle one way or the other, all other things aside. They'll certainly be the deciding factor, Goldenblade considers as she goes over some plans at a table near Carbon.

She looks up as he comes in and dumps out his collected tags, smiling grimly. "Good job," she calls. Goldenblade is probably most famous as Eas's builder, or at least re-builder, she's headed all of the construction and restoration since the beginning here. Few people also know, and Carbon may be one of those people, that Goldenblade, Wake, and Akatsuki from NWA had briefly formed a kind of ninja team. Akatsuki's gone her own way now, of course, and Wake is pursuing other goals, but Goldenblade still teaches the Ninja Vanish skill for those that ask.

"Thank you." He replies to Goldenblade, pulling up ins inventory and quickly pulling out something to eat. It's nothing fancy, not exactly a Crescent Burger, but it's better than the menu made swill they were having to deal with when they first got here, "I managed to catch a few scouting patrols unaware, but the large force making their way back from Shibuya would have been too much to handle. I did shadow them for a while though. Looks like New World gave them one hell of a fight."

He takes a bite out of his meal, and then considers, "Do we have any plans for driving them out of Mac Anu yet? I went nearby, it's a fortress on top of a second, tougher fortress at this point."

Goldenblade won't ask how Carbon trailed the Palace Landers sailing from Shibuya to Mac Anu. Well, he could have watched the boats from shore, she's sure they would be visible from there. She nods about NWA having given them a fight. "They hate players so much it hurts, I'm sure it was like prying out a limpet. But nothing's happening in Mac Anu until we can unCrown their Kunie, which is going to be very hard."

She takes another look over at Carbon, and says, "You're a stealth class, yes? Sniper or Ninja or one of those?" A quick Inspect would answer that question, but Inspect is not something she always thinks of. "It may be down to us to sneak in and get someone close that can do the unCrowning thing."

"Sniper, yes." He replies, "With Thief as a profession. If you need someone to get somewhere quietly, I'm your guy." He hmms, "Do we know where the Kunie is that needs to be uncrowned? Or is that something we'd be looking for? Because I'm sure I could gather the intel if needed, but I don't think I could do the uncrowning myself."

He takes another bite, and then a drink to wash it down, "You know I'll do what I can to help. Last thing I want is them having even more time to bring in supplies." He hmms, "Have we figured out a good way to cut off their supply line from the Palace Lands? Their battleships were in port, at least when I checked. If we could figure out a way to get on board and sabotage it, or perhaps plant some of those magic mines that Scale invented."

Goldenblade nods about the unCrowning, and agrees, "That's a wildly rare talent, I'm told, and the Kunie are far too tough to be simply assassinated. But no," she says with a sigh, "we don't know where their Kunie even is, so finding it would be prepatory to any unCrowning plan. It will be complicated by having to go unseen there, as I'm sure Player flags in Mac Anu are like a fire alarm."

She says, "We might ought to do a scouting mission and find that Kunie, though," she says, thinking aloud, "which will not be easy, I assure you. But the Yamato Landers, will almost certainly be on our side, if they haven't been crowned. You know, as I think about this, you and I /might/ be able to pull this off. You're not -from- Fourland, are you? If we get killed, and you respawn there, you'd get crowned, guaranteed. I'm from Westelande, so I'd be OK."

As far as their supply lines, she says, "The Yamato nations won't lend us ships, and the only one we have is hung up refitting. I wanted to rig it out to fight the Palace Landers, but as you know, the war has hung up everything, so we don't have access to -any- naval assets at the moment."

"No, Eastal is my home kingdom. That's one of the main reasons I've been doing scouting missions is because if something goes wrong I'll be alright." He says, before he pulls out some of the notes he'd made, "I'd imagine with the Kunie being as important as they are, I'd be willing to bet it'll have extra security."

He hmms faintly, "Well or we could always try to find one of the Palace Landers who was present when they crowned the Kunie and extract information from them."

Goldenblade nods about Carbon being from Eastal. "That's perfect, then." She shakes her head about shaking down Palace Landers, explaining, "Anyone high enough up to know will have way too many guards on them." She explains her own plan, "But there will be Yamato people who know also, and -they- won't need to have the information beaten out of them." She smiles grimly. "We can beat other things out of the Palace Landers later."

"If we can find the /Yamato/ person who knows where their Kunie is, we may be able to sneak in. I expect they'll be guarded, or with traps, which is another thing I can't do, so we may need to bring in a machanic. Unless you're good with spotting traps?" Because she doesn't know if Snipers get Searching. "Then if we can wipe the Guards and unCrown the Kunie before the Guardians show up, that, I think, is our best bet."

"I mean depends how well they hide them." Carbon replies, "I can disarm them when we find them, but we may need somebody else to locate them." He scratches at the undersde of his muzzle a bit, "How long will we have before the Guardians show up, assuming all goes to plan and we get in there without getting caught?"

Goldenblade shakes her head again, "Unknown, but not long, I think. The Kunie seem to have personal spaces that are outside the capitol city, though, so if we can sneak in before we start, that might be a plan. If they have Guards, we'll have to sneak by them also. How long can you continuously sneak for?" she wonders. "We might need to train a bit, first. Snipers in real life can sit concealed for hours, and we might need to do some extended sneaking."

"We'll only get one chance at this, so we definitely don't want to screw it up." He says, finishing off his meal, "So whatever training we need to do in order to make sure it goes off without a hitch, that's fine by me. I just don't want to give them enough time to get dug in."

Goldenblade nods about having one chance, agreeing, "They'll lock him up tighter than Fort Knox if they think we can sneak in, so yeah. But I think if we can get there, with a person who can do the thing, we might make it. It'll be tough, but that's what makes this game interesting, I think." She smirks, nods about the training. "We'll do what we can in a short time. They're already dug in, but they might not be dug in against infiltration."

"It's worth a shot. We'll need to start setting up recon as soon as we can." He says, "See if we can't find a gap in the patrols on the outside. We can probe as deep as we can into the city." He hmms faintly, "I think it'll be doable, but yeah, won't be easy."

Goldenblade hrms thoughtfully. "We can probably train here as easily as in the Academy in Carmina Gadelica Marina, for this. And it'll be convenient for the mission, when the time comes. We might even convince the Baroness to work with us, though I think that won't happen. I wonder if Scale has any ninjas? Though I guess they'd be more ninja-like if we didn't know about them."

As far as recon, she nods, "A few test missions to see if we can avoid their scouts, no attacks, because that will alert them. But if we can get a good rhythm going, we might be able to sneak in someone who can undo a crown."

"Could always have one of the alliances do an attack on their walls too, opposite of where we're going in." Carbon offers, "Distractions are useful for that kinda thing after all." He hmms at the mention of Scale ninjas, "They're bound to have somebody that can sneak, but I think they tend to be much more...Loud." He grins, "Which could help us in their own way."

Goldenblade chuckles about Scale being loud. "Yeah, I've taught Scalies my Blazing Dodge move. I think that suits them." It's a very non-ninja move, of course. She hrms about distractions, and agrees, "We could roll it into the overall effort, but timing would be very tight. I'm now thinking if we sneak in, find where the Kunie is, chim for the initial attack to begin, they attack, but outside the city, we sneak to the Kunie's location, unCrown him, chim back, and then they press the attack into Mac Anu." She takes a breath. "That's -very- complicated. Complicated plans don't often work."

"There's that old saying. 'No plan survives first contact with the enemy.' I think it's not a bad idea to have a plan with a lot of moving parts, but it pays to rememeber that it'll probably go to hell immediately."

He reaches over to grab the bag of tokens and put it back into his inventory for now, "I did have a thought though. The Kunie controls the Guardians, and as soon as we unCrown him, he may want to get revenge on the Palace Landers. There's no way to be sure, but if we could turn the Guardians on the ones in the town it would drive the others to retreat."

Goldenblade nods to both things, chuckling about plans not surviving contact with the enemy. "That's very true. It's amazing how enemies don't like to cooperate with our plans. But if you can get into their head, and find what they think their best move will be, you can sometimes work out what they will do. Too many plans assume your opponent does what you want, not what they want."

As to setting the Guardians on the Palace Landers, she says, "if that's possible, I'm sure it will be done. I'm assuming worse case is that the Guardians will be either entirely agnostic, or entirely aggressive. If it's the latter case, we may have to body-check the Palace Landers out of the city."

"Well they've got nowhere else to go besides Mac Anu." Carbon replies, "So if we do drive them out of there, it should drive them back into the sea." He rises up from his seat, "And then we have to decide if we want to take the fight to them in their own lands. But the crowns will remain a threat until we do that."

Goldenblade nods about driving the Palace Landers back across the sea. "That's the least we could do. But I think NWA will at least want to kick them out of Seeker's Landing, that's their outpost in the Palace Lands, and I think it'd be a pretty grave injustice to leave people crowned, even if it's over there, so I'd support an offensive to break the Palace Lands entirely."

"Good." Carbon gives Goldenblade another smile, "Keep me in the loop for when we want to do our first test run. I'll be along." He gives her a quick salute with his right hand, and then heads back for the door. He does need to go turn these sigils in to the war effort after all.