+iny ©at people

Now that Wax is here, making the serenity zone wouldn't summon Wax into the game, because he's already here.
That said, I don't think "joining the game and being on our team" is the worst thing he could do to us, and doing something he directly told us not to do minutes before we're going to call him on the phone doesn't strike me as a great plan.
Now, I will admit some level of fault on this one, if we were going to summon one object that would make Wax join the game then maybe, it should have been the cat independence bubble and not the completely useless prank knife, but, hindsight is 20/20!

The way I see it right now we have two very broad options for what we are going to plan to do and I feel like, we need to get on board with one of these otherwise we're just going to be continuing to talk at cross purposes.

Option 1- The easy way: Do what Wax wants.

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SpoilerWe could learn our lessons here and decide to play the game "properly". As Wax apparently intended it to be played.
This would entail either trying to join an existing alliance, enticing someone into our alliance, or teaming up with Wax.
This would mean compromising our morals and contradicting what we just told the cats our plan was, arming them for battle, and then sending them to harm other cats for a cause that doesn't really mean anything to them and barely means anything to us.
Our chances of joining team Grind are slim and to be honest, I also don't want to for other reasons, but I'm not going to go into arguing about this one unless we actually decide we want to go with plan "play the game properly".
Our chances of joining team Rein are higher, although not guaranteed given we don't know what the reaction to our knife stunt was.
Staying just with Wax would put us in a bad spot where we're everyone's enemy except Wax and I don't know why anyone else would choose to join this alliance, plus if they did I'm not sure Wax would still be in this alliance and he'd definitely be the bigger asset than us, but not staying allied with Wax opens the possibility of Wax being on another team, which is also not great for us.

I think this is a bad plan and I don't want to do it, but I can't pretend it isn't an option and if it's what people really want to do then, fuck, I guess it's what we're going to do. It'd probably make writing updates a bit easier on Kitet at the very least :v

Option 2- The hard way: Continue to fuck this game up for everyone, but on purpose this time.

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SpoilerThis plan essentially involves trying to entice other TCPs away from fighting a war for someone else's entertainment. This will be dramatically more difficult than just doing what we're supposed to be doing, and is also likely to make everyone hate us.
It's also something the game master, who is now right here watching us and on our team, explicitly does not want us to do. This is likely to go very badly for us and quite possibly go badly for our cats.
This option quite probably involves abandoning the idea of us winning the game or turning into a real god entirely, and maybe somewhat derails things. Also, nobody else is likely to appreciate us trying to undermine their authority and will probably try to harm our cats to force us out of the game.
Frankly at this point I also don't have any very strong ideas about how we're going to do it, we never did a diplomatic mission when we had time and now it will be much more difficult.

The upside is that it feels a lot more like the right thing to do, and is a plan our cats have expressed more interest in than fighting other cats, but... there's a lot of downsides.

This option does not preclude allying with somebody, but it's hard to see who would want to team up with us if this is what we are doing (although the option of not telling them also exists).
Again, Rein is someone who is more likely to want us on their team than Grind at this point, however as Rein's domain is "control" I can't imagine our actual plan is something that Rein would very much enjoy, as we're... very much not about control here.
Wax will absolutely detest us the moment he figures out this is what we are trying to do and we haven't exactly been subtle up to this point, in fact he already accused us of doing it, however he's also forced to be on our team if we're the smallest team.
This essentially leaves him with only more punitive options than "leave our team", which probably won't be good for us personally, but might at least leave the cats safe. If he made this game, I must imagine he has a soft spot for TCPs... although my faith in that has been shaken a little by "Wax isn't here for diplomatic victories" it's probably worth remembering that TCPs can't actually die unless we choose to kill them... they can just be very horribly wounded. Which uh, actually isn't all that much better.

Allying with someone who isn't Wax will make access to their TCPs easier with some players, but will probably also make it harder with others. Now that Wax is in the game and will presumably be fighting people with or without our approval, we can't pretend to be neutral though. It's either going to be us vs everyone or us vs some people... and then everyone again when our team notice our cats are trying to subvert their influence over their own and kick us off their team.

The only other upside is that I think of any option we have, this one is Just. Option 1 doesn't seem like any kind of justice to me, and we apparently decided that Justice is important to us.

This is definitely the less sensible option. As you may have noticed from my posting history in this thread and specifically, backing the idea of creating a useless prank knife that got us into a lot of trouble, "sensible" isn't necessarily high on my priority list and so this is the option I am absolutely backing, but I don't want to keep doing it and fucking up the thread if it's actually something other people do not also want to do.

I think we've really reached the point in the adventure where we all need to be on at least a similar page, otherwise we're going to keep treading on our own feet and we'll fail at both options regardless, plus make everyone else's time playing this video game a misery.
Or rather, we reached that point a long time ago and ignoring it has got us into more trouble than it needed to, so we should get on that right now.