fandomhigh | Diplomacy, Relationships & Tactics: the Art of War [Monday, Period 1]

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Diplomacy, Relationships & Tactics: the Art of War [Monday, Period 1]

Ghanima was sitting on her desk as the students arrived, her text placed neatly in her lap. Exactly like any other day of class.

The moment the last student was seated, she flipped her book open. "Good morning, class, and welcome. Today with the Third P'ien," she said, holding up the book. "'Attack by Stratagem.' Or as one of my former co-teachers once called it, 'Avoiding Attack by Stratagem from my side of the fence: Make Love, Not War and Drink Sake and Keep Calm ♥.'" Some days Ghanima missed Shunsui very, very much. "Or, in the words of Tzu, 'Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting.'"

"Sun Tzu also said that 'He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.' And, of course, there's the phrase everyone knows, but rarely do they know the source. 'If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.' Know thy enemy and know thyself."

"So, how do you formulate a plan of attack, if are forced to fight? Resorting immediately to violent means is not always the best option. 'Thus the highest form of generalship is to balk the enemy's plans;'" Ghanima recited, watching all of them carefully. "'The next best is to prevent the junction of the enemy's forces; the next in order is to attack the enemy's army in the field; and the worst policy of all is to besiege walled cities.' So speaks Tzu. I'm curious as to how you feel this reflects the every day world, and if you have seen this applied at all in Fandom."

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Victoriously!

Take notes, pass notes, chatter.

Plenty of points to discuss! Feel free to offer your own thoughts and comment on others'. How are Sun Tzu's words reflected in the real world? How can you see them reflected in certain Fandom events? What are some methods in which you can gain a victory in avoiding battle? And how do you decide when to fight and when not to fight?

She's here!

To keep Monday from falling apart.

Peridot

Oh, hey! Peridot actually had examples of these things in action! From a traitorous-clod-rebelling-against-Homeworld perspective, maybe... but even so!

She was grinning a little to herself as the lecture progressed. It was always nice when these things made so much sense.

"The obvious example, of course, is whenever everybody crowds into the library when something goes wrong around here," Peridot offered. "You can't build a plan of attack without knowing what it is you're attacking. Or aren't attacking. Or are throwing frozen sharks at."

Jason Lee Scott

Aloy

Breq

"Is that what people do?"

Breq had been told about invasions but she hadn't yet heard anything about the defense strategies."

"It's what they've done during every disaster I've seen so far, at least when they're able to," Peridot confirmed with a little nod. "The library is always busy when something is going on."

She paused, and then added, "Possibly because Mr. Constantine makes certain it's one of the safest places on the island, granted."

It's one of the reasons she liked it so much, okay?

"So people barricade themselves and wait for the enemy to leave?" Breq asked.

That would never work if the Radchaai decided to annex Fandom.

"And surrender rather than being killed?"

Peridot blinked a few times at that.

"... I don't think most people here actually understand what it means to surrender," she hedged. "But it is a safe place to go while looking for a solution. The library has more resources to access than any informational database I've seen in thousands of years. And almost always has the solution hiding somewhere within it."

Conveniently.

"A solution to what?" Breq had to ask.

She had always had plenty of information at hand to offer to her captains, but not the sort one expected to find in a library. At least that sort of information had never been requested, and she herself had never found it to be relevant.

"To... to whatever problem the island is up against," Peridot hedged, sounding faintly uncertain, now. "Has your assigned sibling told you about the island's occasionally hostile situations, yet?"

"Yes, but so far I have not found any information on the defense strategies," Breq replied. "I considered bringing it up at the Student Council meeting, but they were more concerned with parties."

Peridot reached up and scratched her head in thought.

"I'm not familiar enough about Earth to know if there's any way to plan defense strategies," she confessed. "But I don't know if there's anything in place, exactly."

"If there isn't, there should be. I would be willing to help with this, should there be a way to organize it."

Perhaps it would at least feel familiar to her, even if she had spent her long life attacking rather than defending.

Peridot nodded her head a little, looking curious.

"What would you do?"

"First of all there should be a warning system in place, to give us time to prepare," Breq said. "Then everyone have to have their assigned roles, so that in case of attack everyone knows what to do and who to report to."

This was quite elementary, really, but if the island didn't even have this...

How had the place survived?

Prince Sidon

Peridot squinted for a moment, looking thoughtful.

"Though... how would you set up an early warning defense system for things like reality breaking? I haven't been here all that long, and I've already seen that happen once as it is."

"Doesn't that depend on how reality breaks?" Breq actually considered this. "How does reality break?"

Reality breaking? Maybe this was a Gem way of putting things.

Peridot shrugged a little.

"In my experience so far, the source of the break was elsewhere," she replied. "Any early warning system would, in circumstances like that, have to somehow span every corner of the multiverse. Every timeline. Every reality. Every possibility."

Maybe a Sapphire could manage it?

"No warning system can cover every possible event," Breq replied. "That doesn't mean they're useless."

After a moment she added: "But tell me, what happened?"

Because where she was from, reality didn't break.

Peridot spread her hands a little.

"People went to sleep one night in Fandom. People woke up in the morning in another Fandom."

That was about what she'd gathered of that.

Breq considered this for a moment.

"I'm not sure that can be considered an invasion, strictly speaking."

"I'm not entirely certain 'a hurricane throwing sharks around' really counts as one, either," Peridot noted, "but that seems to be the game this island plays. Not many 'invasions' really count as... invasions. Not in any sense I've ever known."

"I would say a hurricane counts as a natural disaster, not as an invasion," Breq said. "You can make defenses against those as well, but I have less experience of that."

"Hurricane plus sharks," Peridot stressed, and waved her hands around a little. "Mean ones."

She didn't even know what a shark was before that had happened.

"What was used to defend against the sharks?" Breq asked, curious.

"Spaceships," Peridot replied, and then shrugged. "Carrying more sharks."

"Why more sharks?" That seemed illogical. But now she also had another question:

"Are there spaceships here?"

Aloy shrugged. "You try talking first. If they don't want to talk, you hit them. If they don't stop after you hit them, you kill them," she said practically. "But 'hitting' can mean anything-- like your Sun Tzu says, basically. You can sneak past the enemy and get what they want or threaten, or you can block off their routes of escape, intimidate them. Maybe you bloody your nose, or you show that you can stand your ground. I could give you a dozen options, but it depends on who you're up against, why, how, and where."

"We froze the sharks and used them to stop the hurricane," Peridot said. It seemed logical enough to her, anyway. "And of course there are. Some people did come here from space, after all."

Aww, now I miss Shunsui too ♥

Ah, yes, Sidon liked the approach quite a bit, but his smile as he listened was both thoughtful and a little sad. Perhaps that was the problem when the Champions tried to stand up against Calamity Ganon; they simply did not know enough about him. Something perhaps he could rectify for the next time they would need to face him.

"Which then just proves that 'know your enemy, know thyself,' is truly the crux of it after all," Sidon offered a musing to bounce off of Aloy's, smiling faintly. "Choose the best approach based on what you know, or, at the very least, get to know them as well as you can before making your plan."

Khadgar

As you should!

Ghanima misses all her friends who have moved on, but he's got a special place in her ♥.

"It doesn't always take a lot of time," Aloy said. "A bully's a bully and won't deal well if you stand up to him. Machines have weak spots. They're not hard to find. You just have to be willing to look."

Or paste a strange technological object on your face.

It made no sense to Breq whatsoever, but she wan't going to pursue the subject further right now.

"What job did you find for yourself in this?" She asked Peridot.

Then, regarding the spaceships, she added: "Where can they be found?"

Peridot shrugged her shoulder.

"I think there's a landing pad on the roof of the MCA apartments," she shared. "And another one in the scrapyard. That's the one I'm more familiar with."

Though she didn't have a ship.

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Diplomacy, Relationships & Tactics: the Art of War [Monday, Period 1]

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