treave, would C involve waiting for a trial?
This could be one of Aodh's Watchers. The information that he's giving us is stuff that Aodh's Watchers would have known anyways, so this guy could be luring us into an assassination attempt so that we can finally get caught in the act.
You did not act fully within their expectations either, and they will have a hard time attempting to prove it was indeed you that killed the man, particularly since they cannot show the body in public, for the simple reason that there is no body to show. That does not mean time is on your side, Master Ean, as eventually they will be able to either track down evidence or fabricate it. By restricting your activities, they are on the verge of victory. But all is not lost. As I have said, we are finally ready to act."
This could just be an attempt to spur us into making a foolish decision. But it's also correct. So if this is one of Aodh's people, they're putting us in a Catch-22: we go along with the assassination and we're caught red-handed, but if we don't, they fabricate evidence against us regardless. However, the evidence itself is extremely thin considering how well we covered our tracks. Our next move would be a trial if we pick C:
The laws of the empire are upheld by courts that are presided over by justiciars - scholars that have specialized in the complicated, extensive, and ancient laws of the empire in their studies. Enforcement is carried out by prefect squads that operate under a justiciar's command. Each city in the Empire is assigned one court.
We have a few things working in our favour:
- There's no body to show from the "murder", since Aodh is still alive and kicking. They can't produce Aodh... well, unless he plays dead in the middle of the court.
- Thania killed herself. They'd probably bring her family to testify against us. Fortunately, we burned her letter and the Emperor feels guilty about this one.
- Velius' suicide. This one could be problematic. As Aodh said, the "medicine" we used was pretty damning of our intentions, so we'd need to find out how to counter this.
My suggestion is this, bros:
pretend for a second that you're Dio's defense lawyer. What kind of arguments would you make against the charges laid against him, fabricated or otherwise? I'm serious, if you're voting C, plan a defense for Dio.
B could work, but it poses its own problems as well:
You will lead the two assassins to the Prince, then kill them in front of him and pretend they had forced you to do everything that he knows you have done - whatever it is that he knows. You really aren't that interested in being top dog, you just want to be second. Besides, you don't trust these people.
We don't really know what the prince knows. So assuming we double-cross the assassins successfully, we'd still have to correctly determine what the prince knows to get him to trust us again. Keeping our story straight is going to be kind of hard - if we fuck up one detail, he'll find out that we've been deceiving him the whole time. Worse yet, if these Watchers are actually our guys, they might turn against us for the betrayal. It could fuck us over much worse in the long run.
I'm tentatively voting for
C, but I'm willing to flop to B. If one of you is able to clue in on the allegiance of this new masked man from the text, I'm all ears. The problem here is that we can't trust this source at all - for all we know, it could be one of Aodh's Watchers. However, if we keep affirming our innocence and we let this go to a trial, we can use our Watchers to counteract any fabrication of evidence that Aodh's people might come up with. It seems much wiser in the long-term.
Sorry, but that sounds retarded, bro. What do you expect them to say? Of course he's going to say "We are devoted to you, Master Ean!"
