IIRC, Luna's nightmare centrally contained something pretending to be her sister. If something similar happens to Celestia, I feel like that would tap into a big motivation for her to figure out what's going on. If not, well, there's no way to track it back to us without knowledge that would already be disastrous for her to have anyway.
Luna's nightmare is a bad example, as it was done by a MOTH NAME BEING SERIOUS ABOUT IT, and he did the ritual...
differently.
A normal ritual is basically a mental attack. The Master used it as a way to gather intel, with the mental damage basically being
a side effect.
This would be like if we could Redemption of the Forge to turn Velvet from a beautiful Lady into Big Mac, in that both things are at their core
using forge to change the body.
In short, we can't just use rituals for things beside their stated effects. The only time that happened the ritual was done by an UNBOUND NAME, the ONLY ONE in this quest thus far.
There's more than one kind of mental instability. Celestia right now seems to be under the effects of something fascination-adjacent (Lantern association, mania, etc.), so my reasoning is that dread would counter it, or at the very least contribute to a different doom-clock than the one we already have; not make her closer to Daybreaker.
Dread does not counter Fascination. If it did, we would have gone for BOTH Fascination and Dread in that Nat100 SH multi-history update where we could have gotten Neighnia at the cost of 1 dread.
you get the maluses from both Fascination and Dread TOGETHER, instead.
If I remember right, to counter Fascination you basically give up APs to boost your odds of removing it, while to count Dread you instead accept massive maluses (I think -50) in one or more categories of rolls (basically "giving up" on them, not putting in the effort)
I agree, PtN isn't a good idea. I'm using it as an example to show that we have a whole bunch of other potential approaches that we could try in addition to just raising moth faster than Celestia raises lantern. Perhaps we could somehow take advantage of Mareinette's ability to social-mimic us, or we could reveal Luna before we get discovered to distract Celestia; any number of things. I think one of the big strengths of quests is that we can come up with unique solutions, which is what I want to try and explore a little.
I don't think we actually have more potential approaches.
Celestia is EXTREMELY unstable. so unconventional approaches are likely to just set her off.
Luna is currently unwilling to go to Celestia, so that's not really an option unless SHE changes her mind.
we could in theory try to distract her by introducing other lores, but that means we need to introduce them AND convince her to study them over Lantern.
And the problem is,
we don't have much time to do all of this, because in the worst case scenario she might reach Lantern 5 in 4 turns.
And we can't exactly use Mareinette to social-mimic-us with Celestia unless we basically have her do ALL of our commissioner work in our place, as we can't predict WHEN Celestia will come to visit.
As of right now, if Celestia's Lantern reaches our Moth, a conflict is inevitable. Our best options are thus to keep Moth ahead of her (doable up to Moth 5, and maybe more if we get a good artifact after that), to hope a fully trained Luna will come up with an idea, hope that Memory of Light research path will give us
something.
That's it.
Well how about seeing if we can reduce Celestia's lantern lore level.
And by we I mean Baldomare.
Mareinette can do it for Grail, and she made it so her Church does it for Heart.
As a lantern Name shouldn't it be possible for Baldomare to drain the light of lantern out of Celestia. A light snatcher can do it for fascination afterall.
Mareinette was a Name in the fullness of her power. And it was even implied that
she wasn't really trying, that it was basically how Velvet interpreted a
normal conversation.
But Baldomare is in the Wake, with a fraction of her powers, AND is not really trying. AND we also recently found out she's kinda sorta injured in an unclear way.
In other words: It's not in her character sheet, so we can't ask her to do it.
I suppose the closest we could do is... try to create a ritual to drain someone of lore knowledge. Possibly a variant of Incision of the Heart mixed with Path Through Nightmare where we're cutting away their knowledge of the lores as a form of mental attack.
Problem is, she's an Alicorn with really high rolls. We're likely to fail such a confrontation, and EVEN if we succeed that will make her even MORE unstable and paranoid.
After all,
how many people would know she's pursuing this avenue of research? How many would know to target her NOW?
There's the ponies in Eclipse, and then there's the few other ponies she's meeting personally and somewhat regularly, which would be presumably Velvet, Fair Trial and Cadance.
I think a few people brought it up. Problem is, I'm not sure any of her Lore affinities (Heart, Grail, Forge, Lantern) would really help balance out her problems. Maybe keeping her Lores balanced would help even out the effect, but honestly all her affinities just seem uniquely suited to feeding the Daybreaker Problem(tm).
Though, if nothing else, feeding Celestia her other Lores (Grail, Heart, Forge) might distract her from focusing on Lantern as much, which means more time for us.
just to be sure, where those other affinities of her mentioned EXPLICITLY, or where they just our assumption? I forget.
